TV Trivia Note:
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Who Invented Television? |
| The
issue of 'who invented television?' will probably never be
answered to everyone's satisfaction. Each country believed they
have their own television pioneer(s). People in the US believe it
was Jenkins or Farnsworth. The Japanese believe it was Takayanagi.
In Russia it was Boris Rosing. In France it was Belin and
Barthelemy. Eastern Europe, von Mihaly. Germany, Karolus. In the
UK we have the choice of Campbell-Swinton for concept and Baird
for practical demonstration.
A few current authors (Burns and Abramson) have taken a less provincial and more global view and correctly cited almost parallel developments in thinking and experiment around the world. Television had been thought out on paper for some time and had been waiting for developments in electronics to catch up. It did catch up part-way in the early 1920's with the availability of fast, sensitive photo-cells and valve amplifiers. At that time, scanning the picture could not yet be done electronically. Paul Nipkow had invented a method of mechanical scanning for television back in 1884. This was basically a disc with a single spiral of lenses or apertures on it. Each lens corresponded to a line of the television picture. One rotation would give one television frame. Not only was it simple to build (for a small number of lines), it could be used for both camera-scanning and display scanning. The Nipkow disc was used by several of these TV pioneers as the basis for their Television system. |
A A Campbell Swinton |
| The concept of television scanned, synchronized and displayed by electronic means belongs back in 1908 to Campbell Swinton. His was the "Distant Electric Vision" as his letter to Nature (18th June 1908) and subsequent lecture (1911) illustrated with circuit diagrams. This was to be the closest match to the eventual electronic systems in development in the 1920's and a practical reality in the 1930's. However, his concept of television (and it was no more than that) did not apply to today's television system - merely to the valve-analogue implementation. |
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By the mid 1920's there were several experimenters around the world all busy experimenting with their own flavour of mechanically-scanned television. First with a demonstration of 'true' television (by reflected light rather than back-lit silhouettes) was a Scotsman, John Logie Baird. Like his contemporaries, his equipment contained no new major developments that could be attributed to him directly. Baird took Nipkow's scanning disc idea and the latest in electronics and developed this into the first demonstration of 'true' television in London, January 1926. |
