TV: A Forgotten History

just the other day I got an email from YouTube with my channels year-in-review and among other things that told me that in 2019 viewers spent 6.1 million hours watching The History Guy and that's amazing to me because the history guy's not that big a channel by YouTube standards but this really just started as something I was doing my basement because I really love to tell stories of history and that touches me that so many of you share that passion and that you spend your time watching the history guy and I really do thank you but it got me to thinking about how easily we pick the television that we watch these days because I'm old enough to remember when you only got three stations that came into your house through an antenna up on the roof the technology of television has developed dramatically just in my lifetime not even counting all the things that took it up to that point and the development of that that world-changing technology required the convergence of dozens of different kinds of technology and dozens of inventors some of them famous and some of them relatively forgotten and it is certainly history that deserves to be remembered the idea of television electronic transmission of moving pictures goes back to the earliest form of electronic communication the Telegraph to begin connecting the world in 1837 as telegraph wires started crossing nations and then oceans people almost immediately started working on advancements the ability to transmit spoken voice rather than just dots and dashes the ability to transmit without wires and surprisingly early the ability to transmit pictures in 1860 Italian priest Giovanni Caselli invented the pen Telegraph the device would transmit across normal telegraph lines devices at both ends would be synchronized with a pendulum the message would be written with insulating ink on a metal plate the synchronized receiving apparatus would use a piece of paper and pregnant it with a chemical that darkened when the current passed through it the sender would send the image as current and the receiver would decode it the device and early that simile machine could reproduce an image the image would be written a line at a time as the pendulum swung and the lines together would show the image this process was an early version of what is called rasterization stacking lines to make an image called a raster image named for the Latin word for rake would be a critical part of the development of television it was mostly used to check for banking but develop the idea that images could be transmitted by electronic current alone the device was relatively so with essentially only useful for lines not shades but astoundingly it was patented and in commercial use more than a decade ahead of the invention of the telephone the pen Telegraph actually worked on the same principles of modern television a picture would be encoded into an electronic signal which would somehow be transmitted to a receiver who could decode that signal and reconstruct the image but quite a lot would have to be done before that I could show you say moving picture one problem was that the device could only write one line at a time translating moving images were required an ability to draw all the lines at once or at least nearly at once the first solution to that problem came from German inventor Paul Julius Gottlieb nip cow his solution the NIT cow desk patented in 1885 uses a revolving disc perforated with holes in a spiral each hole represents a spot that could encode data as the dispensed each hole encodes dad across the single line the decoding machine would use a synchronized disk which would then stack the Lorenz because the perforations are in a spiral each line is rendered at a different time allowing the data being coded aligned at a time but because the DES spins to the eye the picture seems to be moving together but turning the nipkow disk into a method to broadcast like pictures required other technological developments notably the light-sensitive photo tube developed in the 1870s and the Audion vacuum tube invented by American Lee de Forest and patented in 1907 which amplified signals and was key to both broadcast radio and television in 1925 Scotsman John Baird demonstrated the first working television the system used a subject he actually used dummy heads in his first marble since they had clearer contrast than regular human faces in a darkened room a bright light was shone on them which was reflected to a new cow the light would be captured by photo tubes which would encode the light into electrical signals for brightness and darkness that would be sent via radio to a receiver on the receiver the signals would be read and flashed on a bright lamp through a synchronized nipped out disc as the dis spun the life of the holes in the disk would appear as lines and create a raster image the call leti of the picture depended upon the number of lines that could be encoded and the speed of the disk as larger discs beyond a certain diameter became impractical the picture quality of mechanical television so-called because the light was coded via the spinning disk was limited but the combination of photo tubes more powerful radio transmission and the NIP cow disk allowed the development of early television in many nations purportedly the world's first experimental television station w2 xB began broadcasting in 1928 from the General Electric Corporation facility in Schenectady New York in that station still operates today mechanical television was the primary kind of television that was used for programming in the 1930s but its obvious limitations it tended to create a fairly blurry picture that was fairly small sometimes only a couple inches across simply failed to capture the public's attention and of course the period of the Great Depression was not exactly fertile ground to develop a new expensive luxury consumer item but a quantum leap in television technology was already being developed in 1897 German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun built the first cathode ray tube the CRT is a vacuum tube where electrons are generated and projected onto a phosphorescent screen the phosphor on the screen glows when struck by the electrons the stream of electrons is focused into a tight beam and magnets are used to manipulate the beam was quickly recognized that the CRT had the potential to operate both as an image transmitter and a receiver but early experiments with what would be called electronic as opposed to mechanical television were disappointing while there were many competing systems and developments the first all-electric television system was demonstrated by American inventor Philo Farnsworth in 1927 born in 1906 Farnsworth was said to have had the idea for his electronic television when he was just 14 and realized that only electrons were fast enough to capture and represent a clear moving picture part fourth canto bution was the use of a CRT to both Skien and receive images his system was first demonstrated in 1928 and is widely recognized as the first demonstration of an electronic television system Farnsworth received numerous patents for devices regarding the development of television as well as other pursuits and is widely regarded the inventor of electronic television however multiple inventors in the US and Europe are working on similar ideas the Radio Corporation of America employed russian-born inventor Vladimir Zworykin who had applied for a patent for electronic television in 1923 but had not successfully built a working device RCA sued Farnsworth of her patent priority but Farnsworth eventually won the dispute RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth for the use of his patents and it was a combination of Farnsworth since workmen's contributions as well as developments in Europe that steadily improved the quality of what toy television recording and transmission experimental stations are created in both the United States and Europe and a handful events were broadcast RCA hope to drive the growth of television by using mass production techniques to reduce the cost of the TVs and by increasing programming through its NBC network but the restrictions of the technology the high cost and the limitations of the Great Depression still kept the technology from really taking off and then when ii will work him along most of those resources were turned to wartime technologies like radio and radar for example in April of 1942 the United States stopped the production of all civilian broadcasting equipment and shifted all that material to wartime use at the time there are only an estimated 5,000 television sets in all the United States but the end of the war created fertile ground for the growth of the new technology in October 1945 the US war production board ended its wartime ban on the production of radio and television equipment for consumer use wartime production had grown the US economy substantially in the u.s. enjoyed post-war prosperity by 1947 there are about 44,000 TVs in the United States by 1949 there were 900 40,000 by 1953 there were 20 million televisions offered recently priced entertainment network stations and programs proliferated as programming was supported by advertising it was both affordable and it drove the consumer culture that encouraged buying consumer items like televisions by 1960 three-quarters of American families owned at least one television there were important technological developments of this period notably in 1947 the development of the intercarrier sound system which allowed the processing the sound and the picture together and eliminated the need to have separate transmitters and receivers for audio and video colored television offered its own set of problems the United States had two competing systems and was seeking a standard the initial version selected by the FCC in 1950 would have used the UHF spectrum and signals were being compatible with existing black and white sets this unsurprisingly limited the audience as there was a little color programming being produced and what there was could only be viewed on the limited number of color televisions an integrated system with compatible color where the signal was sent along with the black-and-white image was created and accepted as standard by the FCC in 1953 although the color could only be seen on color receivers both black and white and color televisions could receive the same programs still high costs and limited programming limited the appeal of color sets and color televisions did not start out selling black and white televisions until the 1970s one issue with CRT television is that the tube requires distance for the electron guns to project initial designs port flat screens that rendered the signal differently we're proposes early as the 1960s but were not commercially available until the 1980s the displays were first used in devices like video recorders where the portability of the screen was most important but over time were developed into highly capable and large television sets because they did not require the depth of a CRT screens can now be built into telephones or hung on walls in a liquid crystal display TV the TV has a break backlight and tiny liquid crystals are rotated in front of the light using polarized filters that crystals control the color and intensity of the light they let through building a picture made of pixels newer LED TVs work using essentially the same method but are backlit using light-emitting diodes perhaps the largest transformation in television broadcasting in recent years has been the advent of digital television with analog TV following frequency guidelines set way back in the 1940s a station sends a signal along a radio frequency the programming is coded into the signal via variance in amplitude digital television instead converts the signal into binary bits digital signals are higher-quality and they're more accurately represent the picture and do not degrade over a distance digital is also for efficient recording less bandwidth to send the signal digital television was not made practical until the 1990s when digital compression technology was developed to radically decrease the bandwidth from that which was needed for uncompressed digital video compressed digital television has made high-definition television with much higher levels of resolution than previously available practical the decreased bandwidth required prompted a worldwide effort to move broadcast television to digital allowing greater use of the airwaves the problem is that existing broadcast televisions a disproportionate number of which are still held by people with lesser financial means cannot read a digital signal and require either the addition of it digital to analog converter box or a new television the digital conversion would seem to affect a small population in the United States as estimates are that only about 10% of the population relied on broadcast or antenna based television in 2014 still the u.s. is not expecting completely digital transition and shut off all analog television broadcasting until 2021 originally television was mostly broadcast that is sent over radio frequencies this limited the number of channels that could be offered and required the regulation of television frequencies the sending of signals via wire was actually first a solution for smaller communities that didn't have local broadcasting and had difficulty receiving broadcast or terrestrial television signals because of terrain pay cable service was available in the United States in the 1950s but cables growth was limited as broadcast television was supported by advertising and thus free moreover the networks opposed cables competitor and convinced the FCC to intervene and create regulations that required cable to carry local programming and kept cable out of urban markets where it would compete with broadcast TV in 1972 the rules were loosened while cable carried distant programming and time incorporated created a network on the US East Coast called home box office that offered movies and special event programming on a pay-per-view basis when the FCC allowed television signals to be transmitted via satellite in 1975 HPL took advantage of the ruling local cable operators could get programming via satellite from dish antennas and distribute to customers via cables a federal Court decision in 1977 ruled that the FCC did not have authority to regulate cable TV to protect the networks and many barriers dropped further deregulation occurred under the Reagan administration in the 1980s and by 1985 cable had more than 14 million subscribers in the United States cable TV subscription peaked in the year 2000 about 60 million subscribers but now faces competition from satellite and telephone service providers and the amount of cable subscribers is in the decline the development of the television is strikingly dynamic there at least a dozen inventors that can make a fair claim could be called the inventor of television and new television technologies have changed so quickly that they often barely even resemble the technology from just a few years previous if you ever in your life shelled out a lot of money for a projection screen TV you know exactly what I'm talking about today the line between television and computers has really borrowed as you can now watch television over internet protocols this Smart TVs can access the internet and as television content can be stored on a server and then played on demand and that has reduced the demand for some traditional television technologies for example the number of people who subscribe to cable has steadily declined since the year 2000 and the the ability to watch television on your smartphone or on your tablets actually reduce the need for televisions in the United States which went from an average of 2.6 per household in 2009 to 2.3 / house hold 2015 meanwhile the market research group Nielsen says that in 2018 the average American spent 11 hours a day interacting with the media down from 9 and a half hours just four years previously in 2014 as television time and computer time and social media time have all kind of melded together to be this thing that we call screen time one surprising effect of all this ability to choose your television is that it's brought back a venerable technology and that is many cable cutters are now again putting antennas up on their roof so they can access basic television for free and according to that same Nielsen survey between 2014 and 2018 the percentage of Americans who rely upon an antenna for their television increase from about 10% to about 14% television content continues to powerfully impact culture but now you have so many channels and so many choices that even the small voice like the history guy can touch an audience and that has reduced the relative power of the ones dominant networks and it raises throw any questions about say the psychological impact of all that screen time or what to do about dangerous content and those questions will continue to vex us as this dynamic technology continues to develop into the future I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets of forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on facebook instagram twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do is subscribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 608,837

Rating: 4.9734621 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history guy, history guy, television, tv, Philo Farnsworth, invention

Id: DONjMa99jvk

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019