INTRODUCTION
Television is not a post World War II achievement only a conquest of the mass media. Well over a century has passed since research on television technology first began. The first successful television demonstrations occurred in both the United States and Britain over fifty years ago. Moreover, forty years have gone by since the Federal Communications Commission authorized commercial television and stations began broadcasting on current American monochromatic standards. On the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, an integrated television system, technology, programming requirements, financing, and industry standards had been fully developed and was ready for public consumption. Only the war delayed its triumph in the mass market.
The origins of what would become the present television system can be traced back at least as far as the scanning disk of Paul Nipkow of 1885. All practical television systems use the fundamental idea of scanning an image to produce a time series signal representation which is then transmitted to a