When was the first television created?

Answer 1

Television was developed over several decades from the 1800s.

A German inventor called Nipkow patented a mechanical means of scanning and reproducing an image with a spinning disc. It was called the Nipkow disc and was patented in 1880. Nipkow allowed the patent to lapse and he never developed the idea into a working product.

Some years later, John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor living in England used the Nipkow disc to develop the "Televisor". He demonstrated this working television in 1925 in a department store in London. This same system was adopted by the BBC who began broadcasts with it in 1929.

In 1928 Baird had produced a color television based on the Televisor which used three discs and red, green and blue illumination to generate the full color. This first color television never made it into production.

In the meantime, Philo Farnsworth was working on similar ideas in the US and he demonstrated his own electro-mechanical television system in 1927. Only two years later he had eliminated all of the moving parts and showed off a fully electronic television in 1929.

By 1936, the BBC had dropped Baird's television system and moved to a fully electronic system.

In 1939, RCA bean public broadcasting in the US for the first time. Although RCA used Farnsworth's system from 1929, legal battles prevented it being used for a decade.

There are many other names involved in television and each made his own contribution to the technology. It was Baird and Farnsworth together that shaped the future technology and the television we see today is still based on their technologies.