Items23The creator’s order
  1. 1Nipkow diskNipkow diskPaul 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…0
  2. 2Mechanical televisionMechanical televisionJohn 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…0
  3. 3Image dissectorImage dissectorPhilo 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,…0
  4. 4IconoscopeIconoscopeVladimir 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…0
  5. 5Alexandra Palace television stationAlexandra Palace television stationThe 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…0
  6. 6RCA TRK-12RCA TRK-12RCA'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…0
  7. 7Cable televisionCable televisionCommunity 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…0
  8. 8CT-100CT-100RCA'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…0
  9. 9Robert AdlerRobert AdlerThe 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…0
  10. 10Quadruplex videotapeQuadruplex videotapeThe 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…0