What Can We Do to Help?

[Buck-Beaver]

What do you mean? Television wasn't around til the late 40s.

Actually, TV was invented in the mid-1920s and the first broadcasts were done around 1935 or 1936 I think. Large scale adoption of it didn't start until after WWII, I guess because of the Depression and the War.

 

[D'Snowth]

Actually, TV was invented in the mid-1920s.

All of my history books have said the 1930s.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Yeah, I studied broadcasting in college and that's what I was taught too. Television's history is complicated because there wasn't a single inventor and the technology for it was developed over about 60 years beginning in the 1870s. Another part of the problem is that a lot of North American texts seem to be ignorant of what was going on in the rest of the world. For example, Snow White is often incorrectly cited as the first feature length animated film, but Europeans were doing animated features 20 years earlier.

The basic principles of television were actually demonstrated in the 1800s. The first recorded demonstration of a true television set though was made by John Baird in London in 1925 or 1926 (I can't remember which year). What he invented was mechanical TV, which isn't used now. The first demonstration of electronic television (what we watch today) was by Philo Farnsworth in the late 1920s. They actually had a primitive form of colour TV and even two way television in the 1920s too.

It was the first true over-the-air television broadcasts were done in the 1930s. I think that's what the confusion stems from.