The History of American Television

Abstract

A limited number of developments throughout history has had such an effect the world as television has over the last 70 years. Television has transformed the way the world views the world around us; shaping our idea of beauty and transporting us to far-away places. Television has helped to give the Earth’s population a sense of global community as it brought cultural aspects form every corner of the world directly into the homes of countless people worldwide (Stevens, 2000). The advent this global medium cannot be attributed to any one inventor, but rather the contributions of many researchers, engineers and, businessmen from many nations building upon one another’s work.

Television has matured in the past few decades, and has taken its place among the subjects scholars study seriously. Professors analyze the meaning and significance of classic shows with the care and intellectual respect traditionally accorded to literary masterpieces. Some academics still resist the idea that anything of genuine and lasting artistic value can be found on television. This resistance seldom results from empirical study, that is, from watching the TV programs other scholars are writing about. Rather, it usually takes the form of a blanket condemnation of television as a medium, a dismissal in principle that relieves the critic of any need to bother with studying individual programs. In this article, I explain why it is time for academics to get with the program, or with the artistically sophisticated programs television has to offer.

Willoughby Smith discovered Photoconductivity (a type of resistor) of the element selenium (chemical element) in 1873. Soon to follow in 1884 was Paul Gottlieb Nipkow with an invention called scanning disk. This is the earliest work toward the television. Paul was a 23- year- old student in a German university and patented the first electromechanical television system. Although he never built a working model, commonly used is a variation of this disk until 1939. The World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900 Constantin Perskyi, in a paper to the International Electricity Congress coined the term “Television” and brought the work of Nipkow and others to the public. This process still was missing amplification tube technology that did not come to light until 1907 when the technology became more practical, the main players in this process were by Lee DeForest and Arthur Korn.

In 1909 a rotating mirror-drum, the scanner and a matrix of selenium cells a receiver. This would serve as the first demonstration of instantaneous transmission of still images, performed by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier. These theories, taken to the next step by Boris Rosing and one of his students Vladimir Zworykin, the two would use all the processes thus far and were able to transmit a “very