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Yeah. Yeah. Sit up and sit up and set up it, sit up and sit up and fix it up and sit up and fix it up. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Our next story comes to us from a man who's simply known as the History Guy.
His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The history guy is also heard here at Our American Stories. Let's take a listen to The History Guy and to Evan Schwartz, author of The Last Lone Inventor. as they tell the story of the television. Ah The idea of television, electronic transmission of moving pictures, goes back to the earliest form of electronic communication, the telegraph, which began connecting the world in 1837.
As telegraph wires started crossing nations and then oceans, people almost immediately started working on advancements. The ability to transmit spoken voice rather than just dots and dashes. The ability to transmit without wires, and surprisingly early, the ability to transmit pictures. In 1860, Italian priest Giovanni Caselli invented the pentelegraph. The device would transmit across normal telegraph lines.
Devices at both ends would be synchronized with a pendulum. The message would be written with insulating ink on a metal plate. The synchronized receiving apparatus would use a piece of paper impregnated with a chemical that darkened when a current passed through it. The sender would send the image as current and the receiver would decode it. The device, an early facsimile machine, could reproduce an image.
The image would be written a line at a time as the pendulum swung and the lines together would show the image. This process was an early version of what is called rasterization, stacking lines to make an image called a raster image, named for the Latin word for rake. would be a critical part of the development of television. It was mostly used to check signatures for banking, but developed the idea that images could be transmitted by electronic current alone. The device was relatively slow and essentially only useful for lines, not shades, but astoundingly, it was patented and in commercial use more than a decade.
ahead of the invention of the telephone. Boo! One problem was that the device could only write one line at a time. Translating moving images would require an ability to draw all the lines at once, or at least nearly at once. The first solution to that problem came from German inventor Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow.
His solution, the Nipkow disk, patented in 1885, uses a revolving disk perforated with holes in a spiral. Each hole represents a spot that could encode data. As the disk spins, each hole encodes data across a single line. The decoding machine would use a synchronized disk, which would then stack the lines. But turning the Nipkout disc into a method to broadcast live pictures required other technological developments, notably the light-sensitive photo tube developed in the 1870s and the Audion vacuum tube invented by American Lead DeForest and patented in 1907, which amplified signals and was key to both broadcast radio and television.
In 1925, Scotsman John Baird demonstrated the first working television. The system used a subject, he actually used dummy heads in his first model since they had clearer contrast than regular human faces, in a darkened room. A bright light was shown on them, which was reflected through a Nipkow disk. The light would be captured by photo tubes, which would encode the light into electrical signals for brightness and darkness. That would be sent via radio to a receiver.
On the receiver, the signals would be read and flashed on a bright lamp through a synchronized Nipcow disk. As the disk spun, the light through the holes in the disk would appear as lines and create a raster image. Reportedly, the world's first experimental television station, W2XB, began broadcasting in 1928 from the General Electric Corporation facility in Schenectady, New York. That station still operates today. In 1897, German physicist Carl Ferdinbon built the first cathode ray tube.
The CRT is a vacuum tube where electrons are generated and projected onto a phosphorescent screen. The phosphor on the screen glows when struck by the electrons. The stream of electrons is focused into a tight beam and magnets are used to manipulate the beam. It was quickly recognized that the CRT had the potential to operate both as an image transmitter and a receiver, but early experiments with what would be called electronic as opposed to mechanical television were disappointing. While there were many competing systems and developments, the first all-electric television system was demonstrated by American inventor Philo Farnsworth in 1927.
Philo Farnsworth was the son of a potato farmer. He was shy and withdrawn. but he had some kind of inner drive. He was always tinkering with crystal radio sets, and he was looking up to the heroes of the age. like Edison, Tesla, Ford, the Wright brothers.
Born in 1906, Farnsworth was said to have had the idea for his electronic television when he was just 14 and realized that only electrons were fast enough to capture and represent a clear, moving picture. It was unbelievable to a man of science that a kid. would have this miraculous breakthrough that scientists around the world hadn't conceived of. Pornsworth's contribution was the use of a CRT to both scan and receive images. His system was first demonstrated in 1928 and is widely recognized as the first demonstration of an electronic television system.
Farnsworth Said no, no, no, I'm an inventor. I'm going to use the money from licensing the patents to create more inventions and refine the invention. He wanted to be in control of it. He wanted to be the Edison of television. Farnsworth received numerous patents for devices regarding the development of television as well as other pursuits and is widely regarded as the inventor of electronic television.
However, multiple inventors in the US and Europe are working on similar ideas. The Radio Corporation of America employed Russian-born inventor Vladimir Zvorkin, who had applied for a patent for electronic television in 1923 but had not successfully built a working device. David Sarnoff knew that television had to be invented at RCA, and he needed to take credit for the invention, whatever the cost. He was the radio monopoly. And in one sense, television could disrupt the market for radios.
People might stop buying radios if they read that in the near future I could see pictures on this thing. RCA sued Farnsworth over patent priority. The question at stake was who described in their patent applications a working television system first? And this was pretty hard to figure out.
So they had to hash all this out in patent court. Technical experts had to go through all the evidence.
Okay, next. Farnsworth eventually won the dispute. Mr.
Sonoff, we have a rigorous appeals strategy plan. Keep him busy. File injunctions delay him. For how long? for years.
Until his patents expire. Farnsworth had a lot going for him. He had a working television system. He had the patent rights to produce this television system and earn money from it. But he couldn't do it.
Farnsworth was powerless. RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth for the use of his patents, and it was a combination of Farnsworth's and Zwerkin's contributions as well as developments in Europe that steadily improved the quality of electronic television recording and transmission. Experimental stations were created in both the United States and Europe, and a handful of events were broadcast. RCA hoped to drive the growth of television by using mass production techniques to reduce the cost of the TVs and by increasing programming through its NBC network. But the restrictions of the technology, the high cost, and the limitations of the Great Depression still kept the technology from really taking off.
And then when the Second World War came along, most of those resources were turned to wartime technologies like radio and radar. When the U.S. got involved in the war, all manufacturing in the United States had to be dedicated to wartime equipment.
So television was literally put on hold. for six years. Yeah. Farnsworth's patents expired. in nineteen forty six.
So he was not able to earn royalties from his invention. In time for this incredible explosion of television taking over America. At the time, there were only an estimated 5,000 television sets in all the United States. In October 1945, the U.S. World Production Board ended its wartime ban on the production of radio and television equipment for consumer use.
Wartime production had grown the U.S. economy substantially and the U.S. enjoyed post-war prosperity. By 1947, there were about 44,000 TVs in the United States. By 1949, there were 940,000.
By 1953, there were 20 million. And you've been listening to the history guy tell the story of the television, and it has its roots all the way back. in the telegraph. all the way back to 1837 and the improvements that relentlessly happened after that. And my goodness, you go through all of the phases.
John Beard's first working TV in that darkened room. General Electric putting up the first experimental TV station, CRT, and the potential to be both a transmitter and a receiver. But that first electric TV, A guy named Farnsworth. And there was RCA, the dominant radio player, wanting to stop Farnsworth, worried about TV stealing radio customers. And so off to litigation, off to court they went, challenging Farnsworth's patent.
when we come back, more of the remarkable story of the T V. and how it changed America here. on our American stories. Saturday. August 22nd in Tampa.
Witnessing MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport. Defends her PFL world title. One last time.
Unforgettable and got you marvelous. To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer.
Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com.
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That's why working forest professionals plant over one billion seedlings annually in the U.S., ensuring more trees are planted than harvested. But it takes more than planting to sustain these ecosystems. It means caring for everything in the forest. From clean water to thriving wildlife. Because when we take care of our forests, they'll thrive for generations.
Learn more at WorkingForceInitiative.com. And we return to Our American Stories and to the history guy and Evan Schwartz. Telling the story of the television. Let's pick up where we last left off. As programming was supported by advertising, it was both affordable and it drove the consumer culture that encouraged buying consumer items like televisions.
By 1960, three-quarters of American families owned at least one television. There were important technological developments of this period, notably in 1947 the development of the inter-carrier sound system, which allowed the processing of the sound and the picture together and eliminated the need to have separate transmitters and receivers for audio and video. Color television offered its own set of problems. The United States had two competing systems and was seeking a standard. The initial version selected by the FCC in 1950 would have used the UHF spectrum, and signals were incompatible with existing black and white sets.
This, unsurprisingly, limited the audience as there was little color programming being produced, and what there was could only be viewed on the limited number of color televisions. An integrated system with compatible color where the signal was sent along with the black and white image was created and accepted as standard by the FCC in 1953. Although the color could only be seen on color receivers, both black and white and color televisions could receive the same programs. That's one small step per man. Party.
I have leaps for the entire And I look beautiful for menu. It has a size beauty all its own. Fornsworth created television really to bring people together. around powerful images. And watching the lunar landing on his sofa.
Which was broadcast to the biggest audience ever assembled in the history of the world. It was really a final moment of redemption for him. This is why he did it. This makes it all worthwhile. Still, high costs and limited programming limited the appeal of color sets, and color televisions did not start outselling black and white televisions until the 1970s.
One issue with CRT television is that the tube requires distance for the electron guns to project. Initial designs for flat screens that render the signal differently were proposed as early as the 1960s, but were not commercially available until the 1980s. Displays were first used in devices like video recorders, where the portability of the screen was most important. but over time were developed into highly capable and large television sets. Because they did not require the depth of a CRT, screens could now be built into telephones or hung on walls.
In a liquid crystal display TV, the TV has a bright backlight and tiny liquid crystals are rotated in front of the light. Using polarized filters, the crystals control the color and intensity of the light they let through, building a picture made of pixels. Newer LED TDs work using essentially the same method, but are backlit using light-emitting diodes. Perhaps the largest transformation in television broadcasting in recent years has been the advent of digital television. With analog TV following frequency guidelines set way back in the 1940s, a station sends a signal along a radio frequency, and the programming is coded into the signal via variance in amplitude.
Digital television instead converts the signal into binary bits. Digital signals are higher quality and they more accurately represent the picture and do not degrade over distance. Digivol is also more efficient, requiring less bandwidth to send the signal. Digital television was not made practical until the 1990s, when digital compression technology was developed to radically decrease the bandwidth from that which was needed for uncompressed digital video. Compressed digital television has made high-definition television with much higher levels of resolution than previously available practical.
The decreased bandwidth required prompted a worldwide effort to move broadcast television to digital, allowing greater use of the airways. The problem is that existing broadcast televisions, a disproportionate number of which are still held by people with lesser financial means, cannot read a digital signal and require either the addition of a digital-to-analog converter box or a new television. The digital conversion would seem to affect a small population in the United States, as estimates are that only about 10% of the population relied on broadcast or antenna-based television in 2014. Originally television was mostly broadcast, that is, sent over radio frequencies. This limited the number of channels that could be offered and required the regulation of television frequencies.
The sending of signals via wire was actually first a solution for smaller communities that didn't have local broadcasting and had difficulty receiving broadcast or terrestrial television signals because of terrain. Pay cable service was available in the United States in the 1950s, but cable's growth was limited as broadcast television was supported by advertising and thus free. Moreover, the networks opposed cable's competitor and convinced the FCC to intervene and create regulations that required cable to carry local programming and have cable out of urban markets where it would compete with broadcast TV. In 1972, the rules were loosened to allow cable-carry distant programming and Time Inc. created a network on the U.S.
East Coast called Home Box Office that offered movies and special event programming on a pay-per-view basis. When the FCC allowed television signals to be transmitted via satellite in 1975, HBO took advantage of the ruling. Local cable operators could get programming via satellite from Dish Antennas and distribute to customers via cables. A federal district court decision in 1977 ruled that the FCC did not have authority to regulate cable TV to protect the networks, and many barriers dropped. Further deregulation occurred under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and by 1985 Cable had more than 40 million subscribers in the United States.
Woo! Cable TV subscription peaked in the year 2000 at about 68 million subscribers, but now faces competition from satellite and telephone service providers, and the amount of cable subscribers is in the decline. The development of the television is strikingly dynamic. There are at least a dozen inventors that can make a fair claim to be called the inventor of television. And new television technologies have changed so quickly that they often barely even resemble the technology from just a few years previous.
If you ever in your life shelled out a lot of money for a projection screen TV, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Today, the line between television and computers has really blurred as you can now watch television over internet protocols. As smart TVs can access the internet, and as television content can be stored on a server and then played on demand, and that has reduced the demand for some traditional television technologies. For example, the number of people who subscribe to cable has steadily declined since the year 2000. And the ability to watch television on your smartphone or on your tablet has actually reduced the need for televisions in the United States, which went from an average of 2.6 per household in 2009 to 2.3 per household in 2015.
Meanwhile, the market research group Nielsen says that in 2018, the average American spent 11 hours a day. interacting with the media down from nine and a half hours just four years previously in 2014 as television time and computer time and social media time have all kind of melded together to be this thing that we call screen time. One surprising effect of all this ability to choose your television is that it's brought back a venerable technology, and that is many cable cutters are now again putting antennas up on their roof so they can access basic television for free. And according to that same Nielsen survey between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of Americans who rely upon an antenna for their television increased from about 10% to about 14%. Television content continues to powerfully impact culture, but now you have so many channels and so many choices that even the small voice like the history guy can touch an audience and that has reduced the relative power of the once dominant networks and it raises thorny questions about say the psychological impact of all that screen time or what to do about dangerous content and those questions will continue to vex us as this dynamic technology continues to develop into the future.
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Evan Schwartz, author of The Last Lone Inventor. And also the history guy, who's a frequent contributor here on Our American Stories. If you want more of his stories of forgotten history, please subscribe to his YouTube channel, The History Guy. History deserves to be remembered.
And TV had so many inventors, it's hard to pick one. But chronicling the developments, the iterations from the early 60s to the idea of one TV carrying both black and white and color, this was the problem in its day. Then ultimately solving the rural access problem, which starts cable TV. And here comes broadcast to say, no, that's a threat to our industry. And now look what we have.
It's called screen time, and we get it any old way we can, from a TV, from the internet, from our own phones. The rich story of television, the invention that changed American life. Here on Our American Stories. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa, witnessing MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history.
She's an absolute pioneer. Defense her PFL world title. One last time. Unforgettable and got you, Mark. To an unforgettable career.
Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Upgrade to elite checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 4% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with early pay. Don't settle.
Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit America's ChristianCU.com forward slash iHeart. Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage yield.
Membership eligibility required. And CUA insured. Yeah. Working forest professionals in the U.S. plant more than they harvest, while also caring for water, wildlife, and more.
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