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Television
1926 (Baird); electronic 1927 (Farnsworth, Zworykin)· Invention or discovery· Communication & computing
DebatedHistorians or scientists disagree about what happened, when, or why.
Television sent moving pictures over radio waves, first with spinning mechanical disks, then with fully electronic cameras and picture tubes.
See it on the Technology & Medicine map →How it works
In January 1926 Scottish inventor John Logie Baird showed moving faces in London using a Nipkow disk, a spinning wheel with holes that scans a scene line by line. In 1927 American Philo Farnsworth sent the first fully electronic image; Vladimir Zworykin at RCA built rival camera tubes. Regular broadcasts began in Germany (1935) and Britain (1936). US sales took off after World War II, and American color TV began in 1954.
Why it mattered
Television became the main source of news and entertainment for most people in the late 1900s, reshaping politics, advertising, sport and family life.
Think of it like
Like reading a page very fast, row by row: the camera scans the scene in lines and the screen redraws them.
How we know
The Times reported Baird's 1926 demonstration; Farnsworth's 1927 lab notes and patents, and his 1930s patent fight with RCA, document electronic television.
Still unknown or debated
Who 'invented' television depends on the definition: Baird's mechanical system, Farnsworth's or Zworykin's electronic tubes, or Kenjiro Takayanagi's 1926 picture-tube display in Japan.
Connections (3)
▸Photography led, via cinema, to TelevisionMostly agreed
The connection
Photography first fixed images made by light. Cinema, from 1895, showed that a rapid series of still photographs looks like motion. Television carried that idea into electricity: a camera breaks each frame into lines of light and dark, sends them as a signal, and the screen rebuilds many frames each second.
When and how
Photography from 1839 (France and England); cinema from 1895 (Lumière brothers, Paris); television in 1920s London (Baird) and San Francisco (Farnsworth).
How sure are we?
Television adopted film's frames-per-second approach and soon broadcast films, but its key parts came from electrical work rather than photographic chemistry.
Debates and open questions
Television's more direct roots are electrical: the 1873 finding that selenium conducts better in light, and Paul Nipkow's 1884 scanning disk. So this link is inspiration more than inheritance.
▸Radio led to TelevisionWell documented
The connection
Television used radio's tools: the same broadcast waves, transmitters, antennas and amplifying tubes, now carrying pictures as well as sound. Radio's business model, networks paid for by advertising, carried over too. RCA and its NBC network, giants of American radio, launched US television at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
When and how
Germany (1935), Britain (BBC, 1936) and the US (NBC, 1939); RCA's chief David Sarnoff funded television research with radio profits.
How we know
Patents, company records and broadcast histories show television built on radio technology and networks; early TV sets were mostly sold by radio makers.
Debates and open questions
Was television a natural next step for radio, or a separate invention that borrowed its pipes? The long Farnsworth–RCA patent fight shows how contested the credit was.
▸Television carried live pictures of the Apollo 11 Moon landingWell documented
The connection
A small black-and-white camera on the lunar module sent live pictures of Armstrong's first step. Its unusual format had to be converted for broadcast at receiving stations in California and Australia, which cost picture quality. An estimated 530 to 650 million people, about a sixth of humanity, watched live.
When and how
Sea of Tranquility, July 20, 1969, US time (July 21 in universal time); signals received at Goldstone, California, and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia, then relayed worldwide.
How we know
Broadcast recordings survive, and NASA, network and station logs document the relay; Parkes's role was later dramatized in the 2000 film 'The Dish.'
Debates and open questions
NASA's original higher-quality tapes of the broadcast were apparently erased and reused; a 2009 NASA search concluded they were lost.