The history of television is both complex and far-reaching, involving the work of many inventors and engineers in several countries over many decades. Initially, work proceeded along two different but overlapping lines of development: those designs employing both mechanical and electronic principles, and those employing only electronic principles. Electromechanical television would eventually be abandoned in favor of all-electronic designs.
The o...
more
The history of television is both complex and far-reaching, involving the work of many inventors and engineers in several countries over many decades. Initially, work proceeded along two different but overlapping lines of development: those designs employing both mechanical and electronic principles, and those employing only electronic principles. Electromechanical television would eventually be abandoned in favor of all-electronic designs.
The origins of mechanical television can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884 and John Logie Baird's demonstration of televised moving images in 1926.
As 23-year-old German university student, Nipkow proposed and patented the first "near-practicable" electromechanical television system in 1884. Although he never built a working model of the system, Nipkow's spinning disk design became a common television image...
less
