Anastasia Pflug, age 10, of Corona del Mar, Calif., for her question:
Who invented television?
A television set is one of the most complicated gadgets in our complicated world. What's more, it needs a broadcasting station with all sorts of complicated equipment to send the picture on its way. Many of Andy's readers often wonder which brilliant brain invented all these details. Actually, many inventors and teams of inventors were needed to make the whole wonderful thing work.
The best inventions often begin with just an idea. For example, the Wright Brothers had the idea that it would be very useful to build a flying machine. After much studying and many tests, they invented the airplane. But a television system is much more complicated and many very different inventions are needed to make it work. Maybe the idea was born after radio was invented. Several people thought that it would be nice to send pictures as well as sounds through the air.
Early in the 1900s, many people were sending and receiving radio messages. Soon regular radio programs became very popular. Many invent¬ors tried to find ways to add pictures to the programs. But the task was enormous. Then it turned out that many of the most tricky problems had been solved or partly solved in the past. These earlier inventors simply solved some interesting science problems, with no thoughts about television.
For example, way back in 1873, two English scientists discovered that light causes electrical changes in selenium. Later, this information was needed to build certain TV cameras. In 1888, a German scientist found that light causes certain substances to give off electrons. This idea is used in certain TV tubes.
In the 1880s, Paul Nipkon of Germany invented a revolving disk to scan and relay moving pictures. In 1911, an English inventor found a way to scan with electrons. All these and many other ideas were needed to make a workable TV system. In the 1920s, several teams in America, England and Germany were trying to make a workable system.By this time several of the trickiest problems had been solved by great inventors. Lee De Forest of America invented the triode electrode tube and perfected it to amplify TV signals. In 1922, a 16 year old American boy named Philo Farnsworth invented an electronic scanner that actually sent TV pictures.
The next year, 1923, Vladimir Zworykin invented two basic gadgets that made the whole thing possible. One was the iconoscope, the special camera tube needed to broadcast pictures. The other was the kinescope, the picture tube that receives the programs in your TV set. In 1929, Zworykin used his two inventions with numerous other inventions to prove that the wonderful system was workable.
This list is but a few of the key inventors who helped to make television possible. In 1928, the first American home TV set was demon¬strated in Schenectady. The inventor was E. F. W. Alexanderson. The picture screen was three inches wide and the black and white pictures were somewhat blurry. It worked, but many more inventions were needed to make it work well.