Radio and Television
In 1832, James Lindsay gave a classroom demonstration of wireless telegraphy to his students. By 1854, he was able to demonstrate a transmission across the Firth of Tay from Dundee to Woodhaven, a distance of two miles (3 km), using water as the transmission medium.
Addressing the Franklin Institute in 1893, Nikola Tesla described and demonstrated in detail the principles of wireless telegraphy. The apparatus that he used contained all the elements that were incorporated into radio systems before the development of the vacuum tube. However it was not until 1900 that Reginald Fessenden was able to wirelessly transmit a human voice. In December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi established wireless communication between Britain and Newfoundland, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 (which he shared with Karl Braun).
On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette pictures at the London department store Selfridges. In October 1925, Baird was successful in obtaining moving pictures with halftone shades, which were by most accounts the first true television pictures. This led to a public demonstration of the improved device on 26 January 1926 again at Selfridges. Baird's first devices relied upon the Nipkow disk and thus became known as the mechanical television. It formed the basis of semi-experimental broadcasts done by the British Broadcasting Corporation beginning September 30, 1929.
However for most of the twentieth century televisions depended upon the cathode ray tube invented by Karl Braun. The first version of such a television to show promise was produced by Philo Farnsworth and crude silhouette images were demonstrated to his family on September 7, 1927. Farnsworth's device would compete with the concurrent work of Kalman Tihanyi and Vladimir Zworykin. Zworykin's camera, based on Tihanyi's Radioskop, which later would be known as the Iconoscope, had the backing of the influential Radio Corporation of America (RCA). In the United States, court action between Farnsworth and RCA would resolve in Farnsworth's favour. John Logie Baird switched from mechanical television and became a pioneer of colour television using cathode-ray tubes.
After mid-century the spread of coaxial cable and microwave radio relay allowed television networks to spread across even large countries.
Read more about this topic: History Of Telecommunication
Famous quotes containing the words radio and, radio and/or television:
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)