EOTO Project - Television

Links:

https://stephens.hosting.nyu.edu/History%20of%20Television%20page.html 

https://www.insider.com/the-evolution-of-tvs-through-the-decades 

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1251/public-television

    On September 7, 1927 at his home in San Francisco, CA, Philo Taylor Farnsworth became the first person to ever successfully demonstrate an Electronic Television. Farnsworth was a 21-year-old inventor who had lived without electricity in his house until the age of 14. In high school, he tried to come up with a system of how to create a system to help capture moving images in a form which could then be coded onto radio waves and then transformed back into a picture on a screen. However, the Electronic Television was not the first television prototype to be successfully demonstrated, the first was actually a mechanical television system by John Logie Baird in England and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States in the early 1920s. Compared to the televisions that we have in our homes as well as the ones made today, the electric television is the ancestor of today's models. In 1939, RCA or Radio Corporation of America which had dominated the radio business in the United States with its two NBC networks, invested $50 million into the development of electronic television.  Later in 1939, the Radio Corporation of America paid for a license to use Farnsworth’s television patents, where they eventually began selling television sets with 5 by 12 in picture tubes. Also, in that same year, RCA televised the opening of the New York World's fair as well as a speech by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the first president to ever appear on television and the first ever televised baseball game on May 17th which took place between the universities of Princeton and Columbia. However, the production that went into being able to televise events such as the baseball game between Princeton and Columbia in 1939 had to all be captured by a single camera. Also, due to the limitations of early cameras forced people/actors to work under extremely hot lights and have to wear green makeup and black lipstick. World War II slowed the development of the television as companies like RCA turned their attention to military products instead of televisions. The progress of television was further slowed thanks to a battle over government regulations as well as a struggle over new wavelength allocations with the new FM radio. From 1946 to 1951, the number of television sets in American households increased from 6,000 to over 12 million and by 1955 half of all U.S. homes had a television set. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a monumental moment in not only the history of the United States but in television as well. The Kennedy assassination helped set a new standard for how breaking news stories could be delivered on television and Don Cheadle called it “the moment when the television generation came of age”. In 1964, the first color broadcast happened on prime time television. Since the introduction of color broadcasts, numerous changes to the television have occurred including bigger screens, remote controllers, clearer pictures and so much more. The television was, still is and will continue to be the greatest invention in the entire history of humankind thanks to the way that it has been able to entertain and inform people about what is going on in the world each and every day.