Who Invented Television?

What you believe depends on where you grew up

Allan Milne Lees

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Image credit: unknown from Flickr

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…

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.