I have to mention that I was one of those kids that grew up with the television shows. Now I prefer to spend my free time watching TV rather than reading a good book. A good book gives my subconscious time to create a world based on my brain’s imaginative capabilities, so I can visualize the characters and actions in the book, but television provides these visual interpretations of thoughts directly, saving a significant amount of my time. The thoughts are not mine, but who cares? As long as I receive the information I need, when I need, with images, and in the shortest time, I can interpret and remember it easier.
In the following lines I will give more attention to television as technology, and some details about the first TV displays, those devices found in everyone’s homes, that make the link between the broadcasted information and viewers.
According to Wikipedia, the word “television” means “far sight”, and is a combination of the Greek word “tele” and the Latin “vision”.

How Does a TV Work?



In this picture you are seeing what’s behind the display you are watching movies on, or better said, you used to watch, because this is a Cathode Ray Tube model and now you are probably using an LCD display. Anyway, the base technology is the same in both cases.
In order to produce images, the cathode, which is negatively charged, is heated to provide enough energy in order to emit electrons. The electrons are accelerated towards the anode, which is positively charged. Next, these electrons pass through the anode and spread randomly until they get through the cathode and the anode. An electric force is produced between the two plates and the generated beam reaches the back of your TV display, which has a phosphor layer. As this material glows when hit by electrons, the display lights up.
Now the interesting part: The beam of electrons, which looks like a line, is set to hit the screen in different parts and at different times, so after the lines for one picture are scanned in, the lines for the next picture are scanned in. Our brain can’t see this succession of dots coming so fast, but what we see is the whole image reassembled from dots. As the images come in rapid succession, we see them reassembled into a moving scene, because the brain can’t perceive the moment when dots for the next image arrive.



The first television, called mechanical television, used the Nipkow disk, which was an image scanning device invented in 1884 and consisting of a spinning disk featuring a series of equally distanced circular holes of equal diameter drilled in it, forming a single-turn spiral, starting from an external radial point of the disk and proceeding to the center of the disk. The holes take pieces of the image projected by a lens, and a sensor picks them in the form of light and dark patterns.

(Sources The University of Colorado ; howstuffworks)

History of the Television



This is a subject we could talk about for hours and that involves large physics knowledge, so in short words, the following are the steps made until the first live transmission took place:
1925 - John Logie Baird from Scottland demonstrated televised silhouette images in motion.
1927 - John Logie Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow.
1928 - John Logie Baird broadcasted the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission.
1929 - John Logie Baird participated in the development of the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany, and together with Bernard Natan of Pathe, created the first TV company in France, called Télévision-Baird-Natan.
…and in 1931 took place the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby.

First Television Invented



The answer is quite simple:
The patent for the first electromechanical television system was published in 1884 by Nipkow, when he revealed the spinning disk.
Who invented the color TV? - Later in 1938, the first color TV technology was patented by Werner Flechsig from Germany, and the principle behind this project was the shadow mask. This technology adopted for CRTs to produce color images, consists of a metal plate with very small holes in it, which separate the colored phosphors in the layer behind the front glass of the screen, and which are drilled in the right places so that the electrons from each of the tube's 3 cathode guns reach only the right-colored phosphors on the display. These 3 beams pass through the same holes but in different angles.

Television - First Broadcast

The first time television broadcast was in 1928 in the United States and the system was, of course, mechanical. In the United Kingdom and Germany it took place a year later, in 1929. After that, the following 7 countries welcomed the first TV transmissions: France and Russia in 1931, Poland in 1937, Japan and Italy in 1939, and Canada in 1946.



The invention of television lead at the existent display technologies including CRT, which is still used in some places, LCD, Plasma, DLP and OLED.