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Who Invented Television?
What you believe depends on where you grew up
We humans are evolved to believe whatever we’re told by purported authority figures. Hardly anyone, even today when information is no more than a click away, can be bothered to do any research. Consequently we all tend to believe whatever it was we were told when we were growing up.
Raised in Texas? Evolution is a myth invented by Satanists. Raised in Arabia? Allah is the only true god. Raised in France? Humanist values emanate from the most cultured nation on the planet. Raised in Scotland? John Logie Baird invented the television.
Alas for our beliefs, they are rarely accurate.
Baird invented the television in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter, although to be fair to Baird he actually built working prototypes whereas da Vinci merely sketched his ideas on paper. As a result, toward the end of 1925 Baird’s device was able to reproduce the image of a silhouette in back-and-white and then later a more-or-less recognizable image of a human face.
Unfortunately, Baird’s invention was much closer to a Victorian magic lantern than to the televisions that came to dominate people’s homes more than thirty years later. This is because Baird’s early television apparatus used rotating wooden discs in which were cut holes of varying size. By combining a light emitter with the rotating holes, a very simple 30-line picture refreshed at 5 frames per second could be created. The picture had very low resolution and was very flickery to the human eye, but it was just about recognizable.
It’s easy to imagine that the limitations of Baird’s mechanical contraption rendered it unsuitable for mass adoption.
At the time Baird was working on his own invention, others were likewise attempting to create moving pictures in a box, but using principles quite different from Baird’s Victorian-style mechanical device. In the USA an inventor by the name of Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin was using cathode-ray tubes as the core technology for both cameras and display screens. Cathode-ray tubes work by means of sending a beam of electrons forward to hit a glass surface impregnated with tiny phosphorous dots. When one of the dots is hit by electrons it briefly gives off…
