The Electronics Revolution Inventing the Future

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Seeing by Electricity: Development of Television
Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.
C. P. Scott, Editor, Manchester Guardian
Well gentlemen, you have now invented the biggest time waster of all time. Use it well.
Isaac Shoenberg following the successful demonstration of electronic television, 1934
John Logie Baird invented television. Well, that’s what is often said. In reality, it is a lot
more complicated. Television was the result of a series of steps, and a few dead ends, taking
place over the best part of a century and involved a large number of people. First of all,
it requires the pictures somehow to be broken up to produce a signal. Also essential are
means to turn light into electricity, and the opposite at the other end. Then, of course, radio
had to be developed to a point where it could carry the signal.
Even the word had to be invented. Once the telephone had arrived there was a feeling
that the next step should be ‘seeing by electricity’, but the concept didn’t have a name. It
was only in 1900, at the IV International Electrotechnical Congress in Paris, that the Russian
engineer Konstantin Persky delivered a speech in which he used the word ‘television’ for
the first time. 1 Despite C. P. Scott’s distaste for its impure etymology, the word gradually
caught on, and it had become accepted by the time such a device was able to be made.
The invention of the telephone partly stemmed from mimicing the diaphram in the ear,
so it was natural to think about whether examination of the physiology of the eye would
lead to some way of dividing up a picture so that it could be sent out. Unfortunately, the
eye works by having a vast number of sensors, and this line of thought led nowhere.
A totally different approach was needed.
Alexander Bain was the son of a crofter from Caithness, Scotland, who became apprenticed
to a clockmaker. 2 In 1837, he moved to London to advance his trade, but soon became
interested in the new field of electricity. His first invention was a way of electrically synchronizing
two pendulum clocks that were remote from each other. The next step was to
use this as part of a device that could send a copy of a picture over a telegraph line. He took
out a British patent in 1843, though he doesn’t appear to have ever built his device. 3
It could only copy something that was made up of electrically conductive and insulating
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
J.B. Williams, The Electronics Revolution, Springer Praxis Books,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49088-5_4
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