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Nipkow disk
Paul Nipkow's patent, 1884
Every television picture since has been built the way this idea proposed: break the scene into lines, send them one after another, rebuild them fast enough that the eye sees a whole. Nipkow's disk did it with a spiral of holes, each one sweeping a strip of the image past a light-sensitive cell, with a matching disk at the receiver. His German patent was granted in January 1885, backdated to January 1884, and it is not known whether he ever tried to build one. The idea waited decades for workable hardware, and in the 1920s and 1930s hundreds of experimental stations used it.
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Mechanical television
John Logie Baird's demonstration in Soho, January 26, 1926
This is the showing usually counted as television's debut, though Baird had shown cruder outline pictures at Selfridges the year before. In his small laboratory at 22 Frith Street, London, members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times watched live moving images on a receiver whose disk had 30 holes in a spiral, spinning in step with the scanning disk at the camera end. The picture was small, dim and flickering. It still proved that live images could be sent and received, and mechanical scanning carried the first wave of experimental broadcasting before electronics overtook it.
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Image dissector
Philo Farnsworth's first electronic image, September 7, 1927
No spinning disk: Farnsworth's camera tube scanned the picture electronically, sweeping an electron image past a small aperture, and electronic scanning is the idea every later camera tube refined. The first image the 21-year-old sent, in his lab at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, was a single straight line painted on a glass slide. That modest line mattered because mechanical disks could not scale to sharp pictures, while electronic scanning could. Farnsworth's patents then fought a long battle with RCA, whose engineers under Vladimir Zworykin were racing toward the same goal, which is why American electronic television has more than one father.
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Iconoscope
Vladimir Zworykin's camera tube at RCA, named in 1931
Farnsworth's dissector needed floods of light. The iconoscope solved that with charge storage: each point of its target kept building up charge for the whole interval between scans, so the camera became sensitive enough for real studios and outdoor events. RCA settled on the name on October 23, 1931. Credit is contested, and fairly so: Hungarian engineer Kálmán Tihanyi had published a charge-storage tube design, RCA approached him in 1930, and Britain's EMI followed the same storage principle for its own camera. Storage tubes like these made live electronic television practical on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Alexandra Palace television station
The BBC's 405-line service, opened November 2, 1936
From this hilltop in north London the BBC began a regular high-definition service, and for a while it ran a live contest between two technologies, alternating week by week between Baird's 240-line system, which relied on intermediate film, and Marconi-EMI's 405-line all-electronic system. The electronic system was the one kept, which settled the argument between mechanical and electronic television in practice. Just as important was the move from laboratory novelty to a scheduled service with programs to watch, which is what gave people a reason to want a set.
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RCA TRK-12
RCA's flagship set at the 1939 New York World's Fair
The TRK-12 is what electronic television looked like when Americans could first buy it: a handsome radio cabinet with a 12-inch tube standing on end, its picture watched in a mirror under the lid because a horizontal tube would have made the cabinet almost three feet deep. It cost $600, more than a modest car, and sold alongside three cheaper sets. RCA made only 1,779 before the war halted progress, but the mirror-lid design shows how much engineering had to bend around the cathode-ray tube, and why shorter, wider tubes became the industry's next long fight.
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Cable television
Community antenna television in the United States, from 1948
Cable began as a fix for bad reception. In towns where mountains, buildings or sheer distance blocked broadcast signals, operators put an antenna where the signal was good and ran coaxial cable to homes. John Walson in Pennsylvania claimed the first such system in 1948, a claim that cannot be verified, and Ed Parsons of Astoria, Oregon, is remembered as the father of community antenna television. For decades cable mostly relayed distant stations, until HBO became the first cable network delivered nationwide by satellite in 1975. That made the wire a source of channels of its own, and cable grew from an estimated 16 million homes in 1980 to 50 million in 1990.
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CT-100
RCA's first NTSC color set, built from March 1954
The clever part of American color was not this set but the standard behind it. The NTSC specifications the FCC approved on December 17, 1953 were compatible: color did not make the millions of existing black-and-white sets obsolete, while new sets showed color. The CT-100 was RCA's first color set built to that standard in quantity, with a 15-inch picture, and only about 4,000 left the Bloomington, Indiana, line. That small run hints at the catch: color stayed a luxury for years. But the compatible approach became the template that later color systems abroad refined.
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Robert Adler
The Zenith Space Command remote, 1956
Robert Adler's design is why people still call a remote a clicker. Earlier Zenith remotes were tethered by a cable or worked by a beam of light that sunlight could trigger by mistake. The Space Command needed no batteries: pressing a button struck an aluminum rod, and the set picked up the ultrasonic tone. Nothing else changed the posture of watching so much, from walking to the set to steering it from the couch. It was costly at first, adding about 30% to a set's price, yet some 9 million ultrasonic-remote sets sold before infrared took over in the 1980s.
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Quadruplex videotape
The Ampex recorder unveiled in Chicago, April 14, 1956
Before videotape, the only way to keep a television picture was kinescope: pointing a film camera at a monitor and waiting hours for the film to be developed. Ampex's two-inch quadruplex machine recorded the picture magnetically and played it back at once. CBS put the first one on the air in late November 1956, using it to repeat Douglas Edwards's evening news for the Pacific time zone so he no longer had to perform it twice. Production machines were priced at $45,000. Tape gave broadcasters editing, repeats and time-zone delays, and it began the long road that ended with people recording television themselves.
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Telstar 1
The satellite launched July 10, 1962, that carried live pictures across the Atlantic
Before Telstar, an ocean was a wall for live television. Hours after its launch from Cape Canaveral, this AT&T-funded satellite relayed live television pictures to France, and before the month was out American and European audiences were watching each other live, with Britain's Goonhilly Downs among the giant ground stations. The catch was orbit: Telstar was available for broadcasts for only about 18 minutes at a time, so it was a proof rather than a service. It still changed what "live" could mean for viewers, and the communications satellites that followed made watching events on the other side of the world as they happened an ordinary part of TV.
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PAL
Walter Bruch's color system, on air from July 1967
PAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, was developed at Telefunken under Walter Bruch between 1962 and 1965 as a German refinement of the American color system. Its trick was to flip the phase of part of the color signal on alternate lines, so errors that shifted hues on one line were offset by the next, giving steadier skin tones. The BBC used it to start Europe's first regular color service in July 1967, opening with the Wimbledon tennis championships, with West Germany close behind. France and the Soviet bloc chose the rival SECAM instead, which left much of the world watching color in one of three incompatible systems.
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Trinitron
Sony's KV-1310, introduced April 15, 1968
Ordinary color tubes fired their beams through a shadow mask, a metal plate full of tiny holes that blocked much of the beam and dimmed the picture. Sony's Trinitron put three cathodes in a line inside a single gun and replaced the mask with an aperture grille, so more of the beam reached the phosphors and the picture was noticeably brighter. The first model, the KV-1310, was launched at a press conference in Japan, and in 1973 Trinitron became the first consumer electronics device to win an Emmy. For the rest of the tube era it was the set many people aspired to own.
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Ceefax
The BBC's teletext service, September 23, 1974 to October 2012
Teletext turned the television into a news terminal years before the web. Pages of text and blocky graphics rode along hidden in the ordinary broadcast signal, and a decoder in the set let viewers call up headlines, sports scores, weather and program listings by page number, at any hour, without waiting for a bulletin. ITV's Oracle followed not long after, and the common standard the BBC and the IBA agreed in 1976 was designed to travel well beyond Britain. Ceefax switched off in October 2012 as the last analog transmitters went dark, its job taken over by digital interactive services.
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Betamax
Sony's SL-6300 and the first Betamax recorders, 1975
Betamax is where watching television stopped being tied to the broadcast schedule. Sony's first models went on sale in 1975, with the SL-6300 priced at 229,800 yen, and the selling point was simple: record a program while you were out and watch it when you liked. The cassettes first held about an hour, and although Sony later stretched that to two hours with Beta II, that early limit mattered against a rival designed around full-length movies and games. Betamax is still remembered for the better picture. It lost the format war, but it gave households their first taste of time-shifting. Pictured: a Betamax cassette above the larger VHS one.
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JVC HR-3300
The first VHS recorder, on sale in Japan from October 31, 1976
JVC's HR-3300 could record two hours on one tape, enough for a feature film or a whole match, and that, more than picture quality, is what won VHS the living room. Betamax gave a better image but shorter running times, and JVC let other manufacturers build VHS machines, so the format soon dominated worldwide. The HR-3300 reached the United States and Britain in 1977. For the next quarter-century, VHS meant taping shows, renting movies and keeping home recordings, and it built the habit of choosing what to watch and when, which every later recorder and on-demand service inherited.
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Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding
NHK's Hi-Vision high definition, first broadcast by satellite in 1989
High definition began as a Japanese research program that NHK started in 1964 with psychophysical experiments on what viewers needed to see. The result had 1,125 scanning lines and a wider 5:3 picture, and MUSE was the compression scheme that squeezed it into a satellite channel, so in 1989 Japan saw the world's first HDTV broadcast. Sets were costly: Sony's 36-inch KW-3600HD of 1990, pictured, cost 2.3 million yen, with the MUSE decoder sold separately. The analog system was later overtaken by digital HD, but it made the case for sharper, wider pictures years before the rest of the world would pay for them.
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Plasma display
Fujitsu's 42-inch plasma television, 1997
For the first time, a big screen did not mean a deep box. Fujitsu's plasma set measured 42 inches diagonally yet was only about 3 inches thick, because each pixel was a tiny cell of gas lit by an electrical discharge rather than a spot painted by a beam. Its US list price was reported as $17,500 or $20,000, and it was not a commercial success. The technology behind it grew from a 1960 research project at the University of Illinois. Plasma went on to define the first wave of wall-hung televisions, prized for deep blacks and smooth motion, until LCD costs fell faster.
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Digital terrestrial television
Britain's digital terrestrial launch, November 15, 1998, and the analog switch-off
Digital broadcasting changed the arithmetic of the airwaves: compressed signals let the spectrum of one analog channel carry several programs, with a picture that was either clean or absent rather than slowly drowned in snow. In Britain, the ONdigital service went live from the Crystal Palace transmitter in London in November 1998, among the very first digital terrestrial services anywhere, and an ordinary rooftop antenna came to bring in far more channels than analog ever could. The switchover finished in October 2012, when Belfast's Divis transmitter was the last in the UK to turn analog off. Many countries made the same move on their own timetables.
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TiVo
The first TiVo digital video recorder, 1999
TiVo kept the VCR's promise and dropped the chores. Instead of tape, the first box recorded about 14 hours of programs to a hard disk, scheduled them from an on-screen program guide, and could pause a live show and restart it right where the viewer left off. It cost $499, plus a fee for the service, and with its rival ReplayTV it defined a new kind of device. Viewers quickly learned they could fast-forward through commercials, and the idea that television waits for the viewer, rather than the other way around, became normal years before on-demand services. The box pictured is a later Series 2 model.
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Sharp Aquos
Sharp's first AQUOS LCD televisions, January 1, 2001
Liquid crystal screens had long been at home in calculators, laptops and small portables, but Sharp's AQUOS launch, the LC-20C1 and LC-15C1 followed a month later by the LC-13C1, presented an LCD as the main family television. Sharp pitched it as the perfect TV for the household of the digital 21st century, gave it a bright 450 cd/m2 panel and had industrial designer Toshiyuki Kita shape the set. These first screens were small next to plasma, but LCD proved the easier technology to make bigger and cheaper, and it went on to push both the picture tube and plasma aside as the ordinary television in most homes.
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Sony XEL-1
The first OLED television, on sale in Japan from December 2007
In an OLED screen every pixel makes its own light and switches fully off, so there is no backlight to glow through the black parts of the picture. Sony's XEL-1 showed what that meant in a set only 3 millimeters thick, with a claimed contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. It was also tiny and dear: an 11-inch, 960 by 540 panel for 200,000 yen, about $1,800 at the time. As a television to live with it made little sense, but as a demonstration it was a landmark, the first time viewers could buy a screen whose blacks were truly black.
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OLED
LG's 55-inch OLED televisions, 2013
The XEL-1 proved OLED could make a picture; LG proved it could make a living-room television. Its flat 55-inch OLED set went on sale in Korea in January 2013, and the curved 55EA9800, built with LG's own WRGB OLED technology and shown in Las Vegas the same month, followed in Korea that spring and reached US buyers on July 24, 2013 at a suggested $14,999. Prices that steep kept it a showpiece at first. Even so, this is the line that brought self-lit pixels and true black to full-size screens, which makes it the natural place for a story that began with a spinning disk to arrive.
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