New Technology TV

As lovers of stunningly beautiful High Definition Television (HDTV), it’s important to remember our debt to some of the pioneers of the electronics revolution. Without the insights and labors of these inventors, we might never have experienced the elation and exhilaration provided by 1080i HDTV and Dolby Surround Sound. Plasma television stands on the shoulders of some of the giants of technology and laboratory science. Some historians have noted that the technologies of Television and Radar are the offspring of Radio. The discovery of Radio owes much to the scientific work of James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist from Scotland. Maxwell’s mathematical genius and his concise equations on electricity furthered the work of Michael Faraday. Maxwell is credited with the paradigm shifting work of explaining the nature of electric and magnetic phenomena. In fact, Maxwell’s work was so far reaching, his equations agreed with Einstein’s Special Relativity that was to come later in the early 1900’s. Maxwell suspected that everyday light that we see (when we watch television, for example) is essentially the same thing as other types of electromagnetic waves—a disturbance in an electromagnetic field.
Ironically, Faraday was slated for a career as bookbinder, but became an assistant to the great scientist Humphry Davy, and is remembered today by the unit of capacitance, the farad. Faraday was very successful in his career, in spite of not having a great flair for mathematics. The scientists and others provided the solid the framework that enabled a multiplicity of inventors and engineers to conceive of the idea of firing electrons inside a vacuum tube—later to become the cathode ray tube— to create the world of television that we have come to know and love. Competition to claim the actual discovery of television still resonates around the globe. Not surprisingly, each geographic region supports its own candidates for greatness in the pantheon of the history of television. If you are French, then you probably celebrate Barthelemy. The Japanese will insist it was Takayanagi, and the Russians can make a good case for Boris Rosing. Americans, insofar as they know him at all, will champion the unlikely cause of the Utah farm boy Farnsworth. The facts seem to support widespread geographical experimentation in many places around the world. As with many new technologies, isolated individuals, unaware of each other’s work, began to engage in activities that would later come to be seen as forays into the creation of television. As strange as it sounds, the first attempts at television were mechanical. A Polish inventor, Nipkow designed a mechanical disk, where series of lenses on a disk turned a full circumference would “refresh” the primitive screen. I say primitive, because even the next generation of this type disk only had 30 lines per picture. Contrasted with today’s, 1080 lines of resolution on some HDTV (High Definition Televisions), it’s easy to see how far we have come. The essential facts of the history of television are still contested today. Since the discovery of TV was a worldwide phenomenon, the information is often seen through a prism of nationalistic and geographic bias. The only certain thing is that Hi-Def technologies are some of the most remarkable artifacts of our modern existence—and they are perched on the edge of even greater advances.