Last Updated on: 8th May 2024, 11:48 am
It’s hard to believe now that once upon a time everyone received their news and entertainment from newspapers! The delivery of the Sunday paper was a big deal, Dad got the sports page with the week’s big scores, the kids fought over the funny pages with their adventure comics and humorous cartoons, and Mom, well she was too busy making breakfast to be bothered with it. Then along came radio, and everyone gathered around that box of song and drama to be entertained by the theatre of the mind. You couldn’t see the big game, but the way the sportscasters presented it you could imagine that you were right there watching it! Radio was great, but then everything changed again!
In the 1940’s a new form of entertainment took the world by storm, the television, more affectionately known as the TV set. The newspapers still came, but sometimes sat out on the front porch until breakfast was over, and the radio was shoved into a dark corner of the living room because the new home entertainment offered moving, talking people just like in the cinema, but performing on a glowing screen right before your very eyes!
By the year 2021, there were an estimated 1.72 billion sets in homes around the world. Although the source of the shows has shifted from broadcast television stations to cable providers, and now to online streaming platforms, and the shape has changed from a big square box to a large, flat screen, people still love to kick back, relax and watch their favourite shows. So, how did this all come about? Let’s take a very brief look at the history of the TV!
The first thing that resembled the modern unit was made by Yasujiro Niwa, a Japanese electrical scientist who invented a simple device for photo-telegraphic transmission across a cable and later over radio, a precursor to mechanical television in the 1920s. The first electronic television in the world was created by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old American inventor and TV pioneer, even though he had lived in a home with no electricity until age 14! Farnsworth was a prodigy and a technological genius who began his career as a youngster reading science magazines. When he was just 13 years old he dreamed up a device that could receive an image transmitted from a far way location, and so the modern television came a step closer to reality. At age 19 Farnsworth patented his TV in 1927, proceeding to build and test his invention until his electronic television was first demonstrated on September 7th, 1927 in San Francisco, a huge success!
Vladimir Zworykin improved on the design, inventing a television that used cathode ray tubes to transmit and receive, which heralded the beginning of modern television.
The tRCA 630-TS set was the first mass-produced television set and went on the market in 1946. The televisions of that decade featured screens around 38 centimetres wide diagonally, placed within large, heavy wooden cabinets that were considered to be a piece of living room furniture. From those humble origins came the big widescreen high-definition TVs of today!
