Television

I

Introduction

Television (TV), system of mass communication, involving the transmission of images and sounds to distant screens, by electronic means over electrical or fibre-optic transmission lines or by electromagnetic radiation (radio waves). TV is a vastly important medium, for a number of reasons: the amount of time that many people spend watching it (31 hours per week, for average United States adults, 25 for Britons); its ability to bring together diverse groups of people in a sense of shared national identity; and its powerful role as a source of information about experiences other than the viewer’s own. It was the first medium to relay, via communications satellites, pictures across continents, and it is the prime route to the public for presenting news and current affairs, including the progress of wars and political campaigns. It is thus a powerful influence on public perception and opinion.

TV developed in Western Europe and North America, but has spread across the world. In 1992 there were roughly 16 TV receivers for every 100 people. However, the distribution of TV is very uneven: there are around 80 sets per 100 US citizens, but only 2.3 per 100 people in non-Arab Africa. TV has in general been a very centralized form of communication, which does not easily permit access and participation. This is partly because TV transmission and production have been so expensive that only a few companies could become involved, and also because governments have strictly regulated who could gain access to the relatively scarce parts of the electromagnetic spectrum allocated for TV transmission. In the 1980s, many new forms of TV-related technology, such as cable television and Direct Broadcast Satellite, began to allow other forms of transmission and reception, and many governments began to relax their regulations about who could broadcast. These technological changes have helped bring about shifts in the cultural significance of TV. For more than 40 years, many of the most important national events, in a number of countries, have been experienced as TV events. Examples include the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the royal wedding of Prince Akihito in Japan in 1959, the annual Super Bowl football match in the United States, and the reporting of various international crises and political assassinations. However, some commentators have claimed that the era when TV served as a source of national bonding is coming to an end, as TV begins to appeal to smaller and more specific segments of the audience, rather than to entire societies. In spite of these changes, TV remains probably the most important form of mass communication of the late 20th century.

II

Invention and Early Development

There was no single moment when TV was invented, and it is very difficult to pick out the contribution of any individual as of more significance than any other. Regular TV broadcasting began in 1936 in Britain, but the development of TV relied on the coming together of a number of developments in related fields, such as telegraphy and electronics, over the previous 60 years. This convergence of innovations happened only when organizations such as the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Electrical and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—institutions with sufficient capital to fund research and development—realized that TV might be the basis of prestige, power, and profit.

A

The Early Innovators

As early as the 1880s, a number of problems were widely recognized as needing to be solved in order to create the transmission of images. The term “television” does not appear to have been used until the beginning of the 20th century and even then, the aim of innovators was not to provide the news and entertainment medium we know today, but rather to develop a more advanced form of telecommunication than the telegraph and the telephone, using pictures as well as sound.

One problem facing developers was the need for a transducer (energy converter) that could turn light into electricity. The ability of the element selenium to do this was recognized in 1873, and spurred the search for more effective photoelectric materials. More efficient photoelectric cells were developed in the early 20th century.

Just as crucial was the problem of scanning: the breaking-up of a moving image into smaller, transferrable parts. In 1884 Paul Nipkow, a German engineer, produced an early version of mechanical TV, which provided a primitive solution to the problem of scanning. Nipkow drilled a spiral of holes in a disc, which was made to rotate. Light passing through these holes registered on a selenium cell. A similar disc rotated at the receiving end of the system, and the light projected by the selenium cell reproduced the original shape silhouetted by the light. Besides scanning, the Nipkow system also had the vital feature of synchronization, in that the two discs rotated at the same speed.

In Britain, the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird is often credited with the invention of TV. In fact, although Baird was responsible for some important early innovations, and provided the first public demonstration of a 30-line image in 1926, his mechanical system was superseded by electronic systems in the 1930s. At the centre of developments in electronic TV was the cathode ray tube, developed in the late 19th century. This is simply a vacuum tube inside which a beam of high-energy electrons focuses on a fluorescent screen to give light. An early Russian innovator, Boris Rozing, modified the cathode ray tube to display images from a mechanical scanner in 1907.

It was in the 1920s that developments in TV began to proceed quickly. The immense success of radio in the post-1918 period led companies to realize that great profits could be made from the manufacture of communications goods. During this era, TV began to be conceived of as a broadcasting technology rather than as a form of telecommunications, as people began to pursue new forms of leisure activity within the home.

B

Zworykin’s Kinescope

Important developments in electronic TV systems were made by two inventors: Vladimir K. Zworykin and Philo T. Farnsworth. In the United States in 1927, Farnsworth patented an electronic camera tube, the image dissector, and went on to develop improvements in the electronic synchronization of cameras and receivers. Farnsworth was something of a maverick, and attempted to work independently of large institutions. It was the corporations, however, that were to determine the technology of TV. Zworykin had been Boris Rozing’s student in St Petersburg, Russia, but had moved to the United States and in the 1920s worked for the giant US electronics companies Westinghouse and RCA, who were collaborating on developing broadcasting technology. In 1923 Zworykin outlined ideas for a TV camera tube that used electrons to scan across a target that had been charged by exposure to light. He failed to produce a workable system, but was eventually commissioned by RCA to extend European developments in cathode-ray technology, and in 1929 he patented a prototype of modern picture (that is, TV set) tubes called the “kinescope”. By 1931 Zworykin’s team at RCA had developed the type of camera tube he had envisaged eight years earlier, and called it an iconoscope.