Inventing Color Television

The Development of Color Television
A German patent in 1904 contained the earliest recorded proposal for a color television system. In 1925, Zworykin filed a patent disclosure for an all-electronic colour television system. Both of these systems were not successful, however, they were the first for color television. A successful color television system began commercial broadcasting, first authorized by the FCC on December 17, 1953 based on a system designed by RCA.

"Between 1946 and 1950 the research staff of RCA Laboratories invented the world’s first electronic, monochrome compatible, color television system." - From IEEE Milestone Plaque.

In 1940, prior to RCA, CBS researchers led by Peter Goldmark invented a mechanical color television system based on the 1928 designs of John Logie Baird. The FCC authorized CBS's color television technology as the national standard in October of 1950, despite the fact that the system was bulky, flickered, and was not compatible with earlier black and white sets. RCA sued to stop the public broadcasting of CBS based systems. CBS had begun color broadcasting on five East Coast stations in June of 1951. However, at that time 10.5 million black and white televisions (half RCA sets) had been sold to the public and very few color sets. Color television production was halted during the Korean war, with that and the lawsuits, and the sluggish sales, the CBS system failed.

Those factors provided RCA with the time to design a better color television, which they based on the 1947 patent application of Alfred Schroeder, for a shadow mask CRT. Their system passed FCC approval in late 1953 and sales of RCA color televisions began in 1954.

Television History with German engineering student, Paul Nipkow

German engineering student, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the world's first electromechanical television system in 1884. Paul Nipkow devised the notion of dissecting the image and transmitting it sequentially. To do this he designed the first television scanning device

Paul Nipkow was the first person to discover television's scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analyzed and transmitted. In 1873 the photoconductive properties of the element selenium were discovered, the fact that selenium's electrical conduction varied with the amount of illumination it received. Paul Nipkow created a rotating scanning disk camera called the Nipkow disk, a device for picture analyzation that consisted of a rapidly rotating disk placed between a scene and a light sensitive selenium element. The image had only 18 lines of resoution.

How It Worked see illustration

"The Nipkow disk was a rotating disk with holes arranged in a spiral around its edge. Light passing through the holes as the disk rotated produced a rectangular scanning pattern or raster which could be used to either generate an electrical signal from the scene for transmitting or to produce an image from the signal at the receiver. As the disk rotated, the image was scanned by the perforations in the disk, and light from different portions of it passed to a selenium photocell. The number of scanned lines was equal to the number of perforations and each rotation of the disk produced a television frame. In the receiver, the brightness of the light source would be varied by the signal voltage. Again, the light passed through a synchronously rotating perforated disk and formed a raster on the projection screen. Mechanical viewers had the serious limitation of resolution and brightness." - source "Who Invented Television" by R. J. Reiman, Historian

No one is sure if Paul Nipkow actually built a working prototype of his television system. It would take the development of the amplification tube in 1907 before the Nipkow Disc would become practical. All electromechanical television systems were outmoded in 1934 by electronic television systems.

History of television

The Invention of Television

Timeline
Television was not invented by a single inventor, instead many people working together and alone over the years, contributed to the evolution of television.

1831-1900 1901-1927 1928-1950 1951-present
1831
Joseph Henry's and Michael Faraday's work with electromagnetism jumpstarts the era of electronic communication.
1862 First Still Image Transferred
Abbe Giovanna Caselli invents his Pantelegraph and becomes the first person to transmit a still image over wires.
1873
Scientists May and Smith experiment with selenium and light, this reveals the possibilty for inventors to transform images into electronic signals.
1876
Boston civil servant George Carey was thinking about complete television systems and in 1877 he put forward drawings for what he called a selenium camera that would allow people to see by electricity.

Eugen Goldstein coins the term "cathode rays" to describe the light emitted when an electric current was forced through a vacuum tube.
Late 1870s
Scientists and engineers like Paiva, Figuier, and Senlecq were suggesting alternative designs for Telectroscopes.
1880
Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison theorize about telephone devices that transmit image as well as sound.

Bell's Photophone used light to transmit sound and he wanted to advance his device for image sending.

George Carey builds a rudimentary system with light-sensitive cells.

1881
Sheldon Bidwell experiments with his Telephotography that was similiar to Bell's Photophone.

1884 18 Lines of Resolution
Paul Nipkow sends images over wires using a rotating metal disk technology calling it the electric telescope with 18 lines of resolution.

1900 And We Called It Television
At the World's Fair in Paris, the first International Congress of Electricity was held. That is where Russian Constantin Perskyi made the first known use of the word "television."