DVD Demystified

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Chapter 2
individual picture element on a separate connection. These were dropped in
favor of rapidly scanning the image one line at a time. In 1884, Paul Nipkow
applied for a patent in Germany on his image-scanning design that used a
rotating disc with holes arranged in a spiral, essentially an updated version
of the phenakistoscope. Television technology improved slowly, still based
on clumsy mechanical designs, until the first experimental broadcasts were
made in the 1920s. Meanwhile, a 14-year-old Utah farm boy named Philo
Farnsworth was looking at plowed furrows and dreaming of deflecting
beams of electrons in similar rows. Six years later, on January 7, 1927, he
submitted the patent applications that established him as the inventor of
the all-electronic television. The honor of creating the first working electronic
television system also belongs to Kenjito Takayanagi of Tokyo, who
transmitted an image of Japanese writing to a cathode-ray tube on Christmas
Day, 1926.
The first nonexperimental television broadcasts began in 1935 in Germany
and included coverage of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The German
system had only 180 lines. In Britain, John Logie Baird steadily improved
a mechanically scanned television system from 50 lines to 240, and the
British Broadcasting Company (BBC) used it for experimental broadcasts.
Improved “high definition” commercial broadcasts using a 405-line system
were begun by the BBC in Britain in 1936, although they were shut down
3 years later by World War II (with a sign-off broadcast of a Mickey Mouse
cartoon) and did not return until 1946 (with a repeat of the same cartoon).
In the United States, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) demonstrated
television to entranced crowds at the 1939 World’s Fair, and RCA’s
David Sarnoff declared that 10,000 sets would be sold before the end of the
year. However, at a price equivalent to more than $2500 and with sparse
programming from scattered transmitters, only a few thousand sets were
sold. NBC began commercial broadcasts on July 1, 1941. Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS) also switched from experimental to commercial
broadcasts at about the same time.
About 10,000 televisions were scattered around the United States in
1946, and when World War II production restrictions were lifted, another
10,000 were soon sold. Three years later, there were over 1 million sets, and
after only 2 more years, in 1951, there were over 10 million. In 1950, the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) selected a new “field sequential”
color system from CBS that used a three-color wheel spinning inside
each TV. This was chosen over RCA’s fully electronic version, which didn’t
have sufficient quality at the time. Luckily circumstances and the Korean
War delayed implementation long enough that CBS abandoned its mechanical
system as RCA improved its electronic version. The official National