Mechanical Television - Rise of Electronic Television

Rise of Electronic Television

The advancement of all-electronic television (including image dissectors and other camera tubes and cathode ray tubes for the reproducer) marked the beginning of the end for mechanical systems as the dominant form of television. Mechanical TV usually only produced small images. It was the main type of TV until the 1930s.

All-electronic television, first demonstrated in September 1927 in San Francisco by Philo Farnsworth, and then publicly by Farnsworth at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1934, was rapidly overtaking mechanical television. Farnsworth's system was first used for broadcasting in 1936, reaching 400 to more than 600 lines with fast field scan rates, along with competing systems by Philco and DuMont Laboratories. The last mechanical television broadcasts ended in 1939 at stations run by a handful of public universities in the United States. In 1939, RCA paid Farnsworth $1 million for his patents after ten years of litigation, and RCA began demonstrating all-electronic television at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.