The History Of Television

7 Pages 1700 Words

Television found its roots in both ends of the economic spectrum. From a small Mormon farm boy named Philo T. Farnsworth to the high powered bankroll of NBC founder David Sarnoff. Through all of its trials and tribulations, through the patent court wars and the shroud of secrecy surrounding Sarnoffs work, it has boomed into the worlds view as the premier medium for communication. Thus it has secured its spot as the greatest invention for the 20th century. The nation was able to see what they had previously only heard. They could now understand an feel the same events that the had only heard about.. From the blurry pictures on a small 5 inch screen to the exploding surround sound and beaming pictures of today, the advent of television has shown us the same world in a new and more exciting light.
Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a Utah log cabin, electricity not included. At the age of 6, Farnsworth declared that he would become an inventor like his idols Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison. The young boy taught himself physics, he constantly studeied Einstein's theories and read borrowed science books and magazines for hours on end. As a teen, he had a job working part time fixing radios and thought constantly about the properties of something known as the electron. This small Mormon child was moved to Idaho where he helped plow the potato fields on a friends farm, a farm which was to be the rather humble birthplace of the television. Using what he knew from books, Farnsworth knew that a group of men had achieved a small amount success with a mechanical television system, sending pictures and images along a thin wire between two spinning disks. These disks had spiral rows of holes to read patterns of


light at one end and project them at the other. But in Farnsworths mind, a setup like this wouldn't move fast enough to catch and ...