It’s hard to imagine life without television. It’s become such an integral part of our lives in the modern world, providing entertainment, news, advertising and a variety of programming for people of all ages.

Digital TV Section | Historic TV Sets

The television as we know it today wasn’t always a high-definition flat screen. Different experiments laid the foundation for the invention of television, and the origins of today’s television system can be traced back to three inventions: Paul Gottlieb Nipkow’s scanning disk in 1884, John Logie Baird’s televised moving images demonstration in 1926 and Philo Farnsworth’s image dissector in 1927.

Television’s Timeline

Nipkow, a student in Germany, was successful at sending images through wires with the aid of a rotating metal disk. This technology was called the electric telescope and had 18 lines of resolution. Nipkow’s work became the first mechanical module of television

Around 1910, Russian scientist Boris Rosing and inventor A.A. Campbell-Swinton from England used a cathode ray tube, or CRT, in addition to the Nipkow’s mechanical scanner system and created a new television system.

From their experiments, two types of television systems came into being: Mechanical television and electronic television.

Mechanical Television

Using Nipkow’s disk idea, American inventor Charles Jenkins invented the first practical mechanical television system in 1923. Eight years later, his Radiovisor Model 100 was sold as a mechanical television.

In 1926, British inventor John Logie Baird was the first person to transmit moving pictures through the mechanical disk system started by Nipkow. For the next five years, the mechanical television system had advanced, but by 1934, all television systems had converted into the electronic system.

Electronic Television

Swinton’s experiments showed that the cathode ray tube’s use for electronic television held great potential. In 1927, Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented a working model of electronic television based on Swinton’s ideas.

Farnsworth started experiments when he was just 14 years old. By the time he was 21, he created the first electronic television system, which did away with the rotating disks and other mechanical aspects of mechanical television. Farnsworth’s television system became the basis of the modern television.

Color Television

In 1904, a patent given in Germany shows the idea for a color television was proposed, but it wasn’t until 1946 when color television systems were given serious consideration in the U.S.

CBS took the lead in developing the first mechanical color television system. In 1950, the FCC announced their color system as the national standard. RCA set out to build a better TV than CBS. The RCA color television system was electronic and by 1953, the FCC gave it the go-ahead.

RCA was also NBC’s parent company and on Jan. 1, 1954, NBC aired the first coast-to-coast color broadcast of the Tournament of Roses Parade. Two years later, the first practical remote control, the Zenith Space Commander, was invented.

As the color television set become more accessible to the general public, more television shows were filmed in color. NBC, CBS and ABC were all airing color prime time shows by the 1966-67 broadcast season and by 1972, more than 50 percent of U.S. households had a color television set.