alt Hacker NewsThis is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end.
Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.
So, who actually invented Television?
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Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).
The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV.
Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
I had a communications theory class in college that addressed "vestigal sideband modulation," which I believe was implemented by Farnsworth. I think this is a critical aspect to the introduction of television technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Sup...
There were a great many small breakthroughs over time. Where you draw the line is up to you.
Wasn't all this early TV experimentation based on Nipkow disks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk)?
"The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television" is a great book detailing the Farnsworth journey.
The thing is that "television" seemed like a thing but really it was a system that required a variety of connected, compatible parts, like the Internet.
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
Baird did. Farnsworth invented the all-electric version (sans mechanical parts).
A kin to Ed Roberts, John Blakenbaker and Mark Dean invented the personal computer but Apple invented the PC as we know it.
> but every TV today is based on his technology.
Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person.
David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…