Missing Link: 100 Years of Television – from the spinning disc to streaming
What we know as television today began with a sweating assistant. Although it's not possible to pinpoint exactly when images started to move.
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William stands in front of a peculiar apparatus that his boss has developed. In the glaring light, he begins to sweat; perhaps also because he doesn't quite trust this apparatus. When he hears his boss call from the next room: "I saw you, William. A picture of television," he supposedly thinks he's crazy. However, it's probably too much to ask to recognize the birth of a medium currently that brings the world closer together, around which families gather evening after evening. For example, to watch a man guide a thread through the eye of a needle with the scoop of an excavator.
William was the assistant to the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird, who is generally considered the inventor of television. However, there is ample room for discussion about when this medium was born. As is often the case, success has many fathers. Generally, however, January 26, 1926, is cited, which is why the 100th anniversary of television is being celebrated these days.
The Nipkow Disc and the Scanning Principle
On that January 26, 1926, Baird demonstrated his recording and playback device to representatives of the press and the scientific Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. However, Baird's recording and playback device would not be conceivable without the disc-shaped perforated spiral that electrical engineering student Paul Nipkow patented in 1884.
Nipkow's patent describes a scanning principle with which an image is captured line by line via a rotating disc. The disc has spirally arranged holes that divide the image into individual points. From this temporal sequence of image points and brightness values, an electrical signal is generated that describes the image point by point.
As early as March 16, 1925, the Scot presented his invention at the London department store Selfridge's as the "First Public Demonstration of Television." Baird showed images of a ventriloquist's dummy because the light required for recording was too hot for a person. By October 2, 1925, the Scot had apparently solved the heat problem, because on that day his assistant William stood in the glaring light of the recording device.
Further Development in the Early Years
At that time, the Scottish engineer transmitted Williams's contour via radio waves. In 1927, he used a telephone line from London to Glasgow for the first time for transmission. A year later, the first transatlantic TV broadcast took place between London and New York. From September 1929, Baird worked with the BBC. The first test broadcasts were produced. However, image and sound were still separate. The sound was transmitted via radio. Synchronicity was a matter of pure luck.
In Germany, too, there was tinkering with television, even though the patent for the Nipkow disc expired without any economic use. Nipkow's name was symbolically charged by the Nazis. On March 22, 1935, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft in Berlin broadcast the first regular TV program, the "Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow" (Paul Nipkow Television Station).
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Electronics Replace Mechanical Television
By this time, however, mechanical television based on the Nipkow disc was already technically obsolete. Four years earlier, physicist Manfred von Ardenne had presented a fully electronic television with a cathode ray tube for the first time at the German Radio Exhibition. And as early as 1926, the Japanese Kenjiro Takayanagi transmitted a character using an electron beam tube.
The electron or cathode ray tube is also known as the Braun tube. Physicist and Nobel laureate Karl Ferdinand Braun developed a cathode ray tube in 1897 to make electrical signals visible. Both von Ardenne and Takayanagi used it for electronic image scanning and display. Although electronic television was more expensive and complicated than the mechanical variant at the time, its end was sealed – especially since the fully electronic system promised higher image resolution.
Children's Programming and Propaganda
However, it would still take time for television to become a mass phenomenon. Key enablers of its success story, even in its early stages, were major events, especially from sports. In 1936, the Nazis broadcast competitions of the Olympic Games from Berlin live to so-called "television lounges" of the Reichspost. However, since only about 170,000 viewers cheered in front of the screens, television was merely a prestige object for the National Socialists. They misused radio for their propaganda instead.
In Great Britain, the BBC broadcast the first children's program in 1937. In the same year, it broadcast 30 minutes of the Wimbledon tennis tournament and the first football match: Arsenal London played against their own reserve team. The Second World War then ensured that the further development of television came to a standstill.
