The technology of television is the result of the work and discoveries of many inventors and engineers over a period of decades to employ overlapping designs combined with basic mechanical and electronic principles. Selenium photo-conductivity which was discovered in 1873 by Willoughby Smith forms the foundation of television technology. In 1884, Paul Nipkow invented the scanning disk and forty years later, John Logie Baird revealed moving images that could be televised. This was combined with the image dissector invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927 to provide the basics of what is known as television today.
Once the basics were developed, a regular feature of television was still pictures that were comprised of spaced dots. Lee DeForest and Arthur Korn were the inventors of the amplification tube technology and Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier demonstrated transmissions that were instantaneous using a selenium matrix combined with a mirror-drum that rotated in the early 1900’s.
Sound was added to the television picture in 1911 by Boris Rosing and Vladimir Zworkin. These two inventors used a vacuum tube with an electric gun and a fluorescent screen, or a CRT, as the receiving device of a mechanical rotating mirror-drum scanner. The sound was not very loud but it provided the foundation for continuing work in televised sound. In 1925, Baird, the inventor of the televised moving image, demonstrated motion images in silhouette. At the same, the transmission of halftone still images was made possible by the AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and Charles Jenkins was working with scanner technology of a lensed disk to produce images at the rate of sixteen frames per second. However, it is to Baird’s credit that the development of the modern television goes with moving images with sound transmitted over the air and the production of the first working television on January 26, 1926. A scanning disk combined with a double spiral of lenses led to the vertically scanned images that were visible on the television.
Germany was the home to the first practical use of television in 1926 with the Olympic Games in 1936 Berlin being broadcast to the public live in Berlin and Leipzig.