History of television: History and Key Facts

The history of television begins with the work of many individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Constantin Perskyi coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the World's Fair in Paris on August 24, 1900.

The first practical transmissions of moving images over a radio system used mechanical rotating perforated disks to scan a scene into a time-varying signal that could be reconstructed at a receiver back into an approximation of the original image. Development of television was interrupted by the Second World War. After the end of the war, all-electronic methods of scanning and displaying images became standard. Several different standards for addition of color to transmitted images were developed with different regions using technically incompatible signal standards.

Television broadcasting expanded rapidly after the war, becoming an important mass medium for advertising, propaganda, and entertainment.

Television broadcasts can be distributed over the air by very high frequency (VHF) and ultra high frequency (UHF) radio signals from terrestrial transmitting stations, by microwave signals from Earth-orbiting satellites, or by wired transmission to individual consumers by cable television. Many countries have since shifted from the original analog radio transmission methods to relying on digital television standards, providing additional operating features and conserving radio spectrum bandwidth for more profitable uses. Television programming can also be distributed over the internet.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from History of television by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.