The Invention of Television and Its Effects on Society

People in today's society live a daily life that a basic person could map out. They go to work, come home and make dinner, and sit down and watch some television. For kids it would be to come home from school, and watch television. Television has become a major power in our culture. It is our way to watch the news, hear the weather forecast, and to sit down and relax watching our favorite show or movie. But is the television really that good for our society? In 1884 the first ideas of the television came to an inventor by the name of Paul Nipkow. It was called the scanning disk and was patented by him in 1884. It worked by having a large disk spin in front of an object, while the photoelectric cell that worked it would take in the changes in the light of the object. If the electricity put up significant changes, then some of the light bulbs on the device would light up and some wouldn't. The concept never took off though because of two reasons. The prototype had too many loopholes, and the disk never scanned a clear live-action picture In 1921, a 14 year-old Philo Farnsworth was working on his father's farm when he came upon his idea for the television. While he was mowing hay in rows, he realized that an image could be reproduced almost immediately when an electron beam scanned a picture in horizontal lines. This was a breakthrough, but it was shared. A Russian immigrant named Vladimir Zworykin at the same time invented a camera in which an image was focused through a lens to an end of a tube lined with many photoelectric cells. The image that was formed by the photoelectric cells would be scanned by an electron beam and transmitted to a cathode-ray tube. Both were outstanding breakthroughs in the development of the television set. Farnsworth's device worked differently than Zworykin's. Farnsworth's image receiving device worked on an anode finger, which is a pencil-sized tube that had a small aperture on the top of the tube. The small aperture on the top of

Cited: Barnouw, Eric. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 New York: Perennial, 2002. Pgs. 98-102, 115-123. McNeil, Alex. Total Television. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Pgs. 534-539. Winn, Marie. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers and Family Life. New York: Penguin Books, 2002