A 3x4 cm screen and a magnifying glass: what the world's first televisions looked like and who invented them

It's hard to imagine now, but the first TV sets at the beginning of the 20th century were more like heavy cabinets with a small screen, which mostly showed a test pattern, since TV broadcasts were only on at certain times. Plus, the picture was black and white and generally the quality left a lot to be desired. It was more like radio with pictures than real television. Still, the idea captured mankind and a hundred years later, probably, there are no people who would not have a TV set at home.

OBOZREVATEL tells about the first televisions, as well as those who invented them.

Who invented television

To name one particular inventor of television (and television in general) will be very difficult, because the invention itself was preceded by discoveries that allowed to realize it. In particular, in the 1830-40s, Samuel Morse developed the telegraph, showing mankind the possibility of transmitting information through wires. Subsequently, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone, which made it possible to transmit the human voice over wires over long distances. Another step towards the invention of television was the so-called electric telescope, which was invented in 1884 by Paul Nipkow. His device could transmit images over wires using rotating disks. It was essentially an early form of mechanical television.

In the early 1900s, Nipkow's system was independently improved by Russian physicist Boris Rozing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton. They came up with the idea of replacing the disks with electron-beam tubes developed earlier by German physicist Karl Braun.

As a result of his work, Swinton created a system in which the electron-beam tubes were placed inside the camera transmitting the image as well as inside the receiver. This was the world's first all-electronic television system.

Then Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin, who emigrated to the United States in 1923 while working for Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, applied for the first television patent, which he called "Ikonoscope."

And in 1927 the world's first working television set was demonstrated by Scottish engineer John Bird in London in the presence of 50 scientists. The company he founded already in 1928 realized the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York, as well as the first transmission to a ship in the mid-Atlantic.

Baird is also credited with the first demonstration of color and stereoscopic television.

Two years later, Zworykin demonstrated his own all-electronic television system at a radio engineering convention in the United States, which attracted the interest of David Sarnoff, head of Radio Corporation of America (RCA), who hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company.

Meanwhile, in 1927, 21-year-old American inventor Philo Farnsworth developed his own television system. His idea was to use a vacuum tube that could lay out an image into lines, transmit them, and turn them back into an image.

Tele-research was not lagging behind in Asia either. In 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated the first television system using a CRT at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan.

In the United States, however, Sarnoff, thanks to the marketing power of his company, widely introduced television to the public at the New York World's Fair in 1939.

Under the auspices of RCA's language division, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff broadcast the opening ceremony, including a speech by President Franklin Roosevelt.

But at that time, television remained poorly understood and inaccessible to ordinary people, whose main sources of information were radio and newspapers. And World War II almost buried the idea of television. However, it was in the post-war period that a new push in the development of television led to the growth of its popularity and its appearance in people's homes.

The first televisions

The first televisions differed visually little from bulky radios and worked in a similar way: the television system consisted of three parts - one receiving sound, one receiving images, and the third outputting it all to the viewer.

It was the viewer, not the audience, because the screens of the first TV sets were the size of a postage stamp, and to "improve" the image, a magnifying glass was installed in front of them. However, this did not help too much, as the picture quality was very poor, so that the viewer could guess the shapes of objects, but not contemplate them in the full sense of the word.

One of the first commercial televisions was the German Telefunken television set, which used an electron beam tube in 1934. However, German television sets were large in size.

Later, other countries around the world began to produce televisions using similar technology. In the United States, the cheapest model with a 12-inch screen (30 cm) cost $445, slightly cheaper than an automobile, which in the late 1930s was asking about $600.

Before World War II, about 19,000 electronic televisions were produced in Britain and about 1,600 in Germany. After the war, however, their production skyrocketed.

With the advent of color screens, from 1946 to 1951 alone, the number of televisions purchased rose from 6,000 to about 12 million. And by 1968, almost every family in Western countries had a television set.

Televisions in the USSR

The Union traditionally kept up with the West, peeking at, and sometimes completely copying ideas. A similar situation occurred with television sets, which already in the early 30s produced "Soviets". It was a model of the B-2 set-top box, which worked on the Nipkov disk system and needed two separate units to work. It had a miniature screen, measuring 3x4 centimeters, "improved" with a magnifying glass. Despite this, 3,000 of these televisions were produced between 1933 and 1936.

Mass production of TV sets in the USSR started in the late 1940s, when TV systems "Moskvich-T1", "Leningrad T-2", "KVN-49" and others began to appear.

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