The history of the television is a long, complicated one. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who invented the first television.
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There are so many factors involved in the invention and engineering of this device that it’s nearly impossible to say with certainly. And while we know who invented the television as we know it now, figuring out who invented that first TV is just not possible.
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The first television was actually invented around 130 years before the first TV was made. That’s right! Before there were TVs there were pictures, and those pictures were invented by an Italian physicist called Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi invented radio and it
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wasn’t until he used radio to send pictures that he termed “television.” Marconi is also the one who came up with the idea of sending a picture by wireless, which is how television got its name as well. But this invention didn’t go over too well at first because it was seen as a frivolous new invention, just like the telephone and phonograph had been viewed in their time.
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Marconi’s invention caught on in a big way though. It was used to transmit pictures from the Boer War in South Africa, and pictures of the sinking of the Titanic
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. The first wireless picture transmission on record was between London and Portsmouth on January 25, 1902. This is when the world became interested in this new technology of wireless transmission of images. But still, no one could figure out how to engineer a smaller version of Marconi’s system or how to make it work specifically as a television.
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After Marconi helped invent radio, many companies were trying to come up with an idea that would take advantage of this new technology. In 1908, a company called Western Electric began developing a radio system that would be used specifically as a television.
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The problem was the wireless signal sent would be too weak to transmit audio and not enough to send pictures. Western Electric soon realized that this would not work for them at all.
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In 1912, Hugo Gernsback published his article “A Method of Removing Chromatic Aberrations from the Image Produced by Radiotelegraphy” tv the Popular Electronics Magazine.
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In this article he described how any picture could be transmitted over the airwaves by using an oscillating current in rotating coils of wire. This rotating wire would form the images from the electric current. This system was then improved upon in 1914 by Lee de Forest and Arthur Korn.
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In 1915, Elmer Sperry patented his “Nip-Shot” device. Sperry also ran a company called “Sears” which tried to sell this new technology on a commercial level.
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This invention used an oscillating scanner that would scan closely packed picture elements to reproduce a complete image on the screen. Also in 1915, Philo Taylor Farnsworth allegedly developed his first projection television system in his garage.
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So it would seem that the pieces of this puzzle were developing, but still no one knew how to put it all together.In 1916, an engineer named Jay W. Forrester created a design for a “Projector Tube” that could be used to send moving images across the airwaves to a receiv
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Farnsworth took this idea and built on it by improving the video amplifier and integrating it into his tube-based system…but he also went further in making his tube work as a television by adding optics that allowed better imaging.
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Farnsworth filed patent of his system in June of 1915 and established an electronics company called “Regency” in 1917.
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