Invention of the Television
Inventor of the Mechanical Television
John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, was born on August 13, 1888, in Scotland and died on June 14, 1946, in the United Kingdom. He is considered the first person to display moving pictures on a television. Baird studied electrical engineering at the University of Glasgow and moved to Hastings in 1922. He tested a locally made transmission device and managed to show shadowy television pictures in a Selfridge store in 1925. In 1927, he founded his own company, which began a trial television service for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1929. Regular broadcasts continued from Alexandra Palace until 1936.
Inventor of the Electronic Television
Philo Farnsworth is credited with inventing the first fully electronic television. Born in 1906 in southwestern Utah, he died in 1971. While in high school, Farnsworth had converted most of his family's household devices to run on electrical power. He was fascinated by new devices of his time, such as Bell's telephone and Edison's gramophone. In 1922, Farnsworth sketched for his teacher an idea for a vacuum tube that could revolutionize television. He imagined a vacuum tube that could electronically produce images by directing an electron beam line by line onto a light-sensitive screen. In 1927, the first fully electronic television appeared, and Farnsworth received a patent for it in 1930.