The history
140 years from a spinning disc with holes to thin glowing screens that stream from the internet.
Television began with one idea: cut a picture into thin lines, send the lines one by one, and paint them back fast enough that the eye sees a moving image. Inventors first did it with spinning discs, then with beams of electrons in glass tubes, and later with millions of tiny liquid-crystal shutters and glowing pixels. Along the way TV spread from a London attic to satellites over Indian villages and apps on smart TVs.
1884 (granted 1885)
Patent for a scanning disc
Paul Nipkow, Germany
1897
Cathode-ray tube
Karl Ferdinand Braun, Germany
26 January 1926
Live moving picture in shades of grey, shown to an audience
John Logie Baird, UK
25 December 1926
Character shown on an electronic (CRT) screen
Kenjiro Takayanagi, Japan
7 September 1927
All-electronic picture, camera to screen
Philo and Pem Farnsworth, USA
2 November 1936
Regular high-definition TV service
BBC, UK
1955
Wireless TV remote
Eugene Polley, Zenith, USA
15 September 1959
Television in India
Doordarshan, Delhi
2007
OLED television
Sony XEL-1, Japan
1884 – 1935
Inventors scan pictures with spinning discs full of holes. The first live, moving images appear, small, flickering and orange-tinted.
1884
Applied 6 January 1884, granted 15 January 1885
A 23-year-old student in Berlin patented an “electric telescope”. Its heart was a disc with a spiral of small holes. As the disc spun, each hole swept across one thin strip of the picture, so the whole image was read line by line.
Why it mattered. Breaking a picture into lines, one after another, is still how every TV picture is built.
1925
25 March 1925
Baird showed moving silhouettes on his mechanical television to shoppers at Selfridges. The pictures were only outlines, with no shades of grey. Later that year, in his attic lab, he got a greyscale picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first times the public saw moving pictures sent by wire.
1926
26 January 1926
About 40 members of the Royal Institution climbed the stairs to Baird’s lab to see live faces on a small screen. His system used spinning discs and about 30 lines, with a picture that flickered but moved. The receiver he used is now in the Science Museum.
Why it mattered. It is widely called the first demonstration of true television: live, moving and in shades of grey.
1926
25 December 1926
Working on his own, far from Europe and America, Takayanagi sent the katakana letter イ (i) to a cathode-ray tube screen. He used a Nipkow disc to scan and a CRT to show, with 40 lines. He is called the father of Japanese television.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first pictures ever shown on an electronic screen.
1928
3 July 1928
Baird used discs with red, green and blue filters to send the world’s first colour television pictures. The same year his team sent a picture across the Atlantic. Mechanical TV was clever, but the pictures stayed small and blurry.
Why it mattered. Mixing red, green and blue is still how every colour screen works.
1897 – 1940
The cathode-ray tube and electronic cameras replace moving parts. Regular broadcasting begins.
1897
Braun built a glass tube that fired a beam of electrons at a screen coated with a glowing chemical. Magnets could steer the beam, so a spot of light moved wherever you wanted. In Japan and Korea the CRT is still sometimes called the “Braun tube”.
Why it mattered. The CRT became the screen inside almost every television for the next hundred years.
1907
Patent 1907, demonstration 9 May 1911
Rosing patented a system that used a mechanical scanner and a photocell to read the scene and a cathode-ray tube to show it. On 9 May 1911 he showed crude shapes on the tube. His student and helper was a young Vladimir Zworykin.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first times a CRT was used as a television screen.
1908
18 June 1908
In a short letter to the journal Nature, a Scottish engineer suggested using two cathode-ray beams, one to read the picture and one to paint it. There would be no spinning parts at all. Nobody could build it yet.
Why it mattered. It is widely seen as the first description of fully electronic television.
1927
7 September 1927
Farnsworth said he got the idea of scanning line by line as a teenager ploughing a field. At 21 his image dissector camera tube sent a simple straight line to a screen in the next room. There were no moving parts anywhere.
Why it mattered. It was the first all-electronic television picture, from camera to screen.
1933
Announced June 1933
Zworykin, who had filed a TV patent in 1923, showed the iconoscope camera tube to the press in June 1933. It collected light across a whole picture between scans, which made it far more sensitive. The Hungarian Kálmán Tihanyi had patented this charge-storage idea in 1926, and RCA bought his patents.
Why it mattered. Sensitive electronic cameras made studio television practical.
1936
2 November 1936
The BBC began a regular “high-definition” service from Alexandra Palace. Two systems took turns: Baird’s 240-line system and Marconi-EMI’s all-electronic 405 lines. In 1937 the BBC chose the electronic one.
Why it mattered. It is widely called the world’s first regular high-definition TV service.
1950 – 1990
Colour, remote controls and national channels arrive. In India, Doordarshan and satellites bring TV to cities and villages.
1953
17 December 1953
The US Federal Communications Commission approved a colour TV standard. The clever trick was to add colour as an extra signal, so old black-and-white sets still showed the picture. On 1 January 1954 the Rose Parade became the first nationwide colour broadcast.
Why it mattered. Sending brightness and colour separately is still how colour TV signals are built.
1955
Zenith’s Flash-Matic looked like a ray gun. You pointed its beam of light at one of four photocells in the corners of the screen to change channel or mute. Sadly, bright sunlight could change the channel too.
Why it mattered. It started the idea of controlling a TV from the sofa, which ultrasonic and then infrared remotes made reliable.
1959
15 September 1959
India’s television began as an experiment in Delhi, with a small transmitter and a makeshift studio. Daily service began in 1965, with a news bulletin read by Pratima Puri. In 1976 Doordarshan became separate from radio.
Why it mattered. It was the start of what grew into one of the world’s biggest TV audiences.
1975
1 August 1975 – 31 July 1976
For one year, NASA’s ATS-6 satellite beamed programmes on farming, health and schooling to more than 2,400 villages. Each village got a TV set and a dish antenna 3 metres wide. At first, 200 to 600 people gathered round a single set.
Why it mattered. It proved that satellites could bring television to places no tower could reach.
1982
15 August 1982; Asian Games from 19 November 1982
Doordarshan broadcast Indira Gandhi’s Independence Day speech in colour on 15 August 1982. Colour broadcasts were started expressly for the Asian Games held in Delhi that November. The national channel, now DD National, also began that year.
Why it mattered. Colour and a national channel turned television into something the whole country shared.
1987
25 January 1987
Ramayan began on Sunday mornings on Doordarshan and ran for 78 episodes. Estimates of its peak audience run from 80 to 100 million people. Streets emptied and shops closed while it was on.
Why it mattered. It showed how one screen in a room could gather a whole nation at the same moment.
1964 – 2013
Plasma, liquid crystals and organic LEDs slowly replace the heavy glass tube.
1964
Three researchers built a plasma display for PLATO, an early computer teaching system. Each dot was a tiny cell of gas that glowed when zapped with electricity. Decades later the same idea gave the world big flat TVs.
Why it mattered. It showed that a screen could be flat, with no tube behind it.
1968
28 May 1968
RCA showed the first liquid crystal displays at a press conference in New York. A small voltage changed how the crystals handled light. The team predicted flat screens would one day replace bulky picture tubes.
Why it mattered. It was the first step toward the LCD in most TVs sold today.
1970
Patents 1970–1971
Schadt and Helfrich at Hoffmann-La Roche filed a patent on 4 December 1970 for a twisted layer of liquid crystal between two polarising filters. Fergason in the US patented the same idea in 1971, and the rivals later shared the royalties. The twist lets each cell act as a tiny light shutter that needs very little power.
Why it mattered. Almost every LCD for decades was built on this twisted-nematic trick.
1987
Two Kodak chemists built the first practical OLED: thin layers of carbon-based material that glow when a current flows. Each dot makes its own light, so no backlight is needed. Tang was born in Hong Kong.
Why it mattered. It is the ancestor of the OLED screens in today’s best TVs and phones.
1997
Fujitsu began mass-producing 42-inch colour plasma panels in October 1996. In 1997 the first plasma TVs went on sale, only about 75 mm thick. They cost as much as a car: about US$15,000 to US$20,000.
Why it mattered. People saw for the first time that a TV could hang on a wall like a painting.
2007
Fourth quarter of 2007
For the first time, more LCD TVs were sold around the world than CRT TVs: about 47% against 46% in the last three months of 2007. In richer countries the switch had come a few years earlier. Within a decade, big factories had stopped making picture tubes.
Why it mattered. The glass tube that had defined television for 70 years began to disappear.
2007
1 December 2007
Sony’s XEL-1 had an 11-inch screen only 3 mm thick and cost 200,000 yen. Because each pixel makes its own light, black parts of the picture could be truly black. It was small, pricey, and more of a preview than a family TV.
Why it mattered. It proved OLED could make a television, not just a tiny phone screen.
2013
January 2013
LG began taking orders for a 55-inch OLED TV, the 55EM9700, just 4 mm thick. Each pixel had red, green, blue and an extra white sub-pixel. It cost about US$10,000.
Why it mattered. Big OLED TVs with perfect blacks became a real product you could buy.
By the numbers
From about one home in three in 2001 to about two in three by 2018.
1991 – today
Pictures arrive by satellite, cable and the internet, sharper than ever, and India becomes one of the world’s biggest TV nations.
1991
1991–1992
Live CNN coverage of the Gulf War in early 1991 showed Indian viewers what satellite TV could do. Star TV began beaming channels over Asia from the AsiaSat 1 satellite, and Zee TV, the first private Hindi channel, launched in October 1992. Local cable operators strung wires from dishes to homes.
Why it mattered. Doordarshan was no longer the only channel, and cable spread fast.
2004
16 December 2004
Doordarshan launched DD Direct Plus, now called DD Free Dish, a satellite service with no monthly fee. Anyone with a small dish and a set-top box could watch. By 2022 it reached over 43 million homes.
Why it mattered. It brought many channels to villages where cable never went.
2014
April 2014
Netflix began streaming the second season of House of Cards in 4K, with four times the pixels of Full HD. It only worked on new smart TVs with streaming apps and newer video compression built in. More and more, TV came through the internet instead of an antenna.
Why it mattered. The picture on a TV now depended on the internet as much as on the screen.
2020
2020 (published 15 April 2021)
BARC India estimated that 210 million Indian households owned a TV, up from 197 million in 2018. That meant about 892 million people could watch. Around 90 million homes still did not have one.
Why it mattered. Even in the age of phones, television is still growing in India.
By the numbers
BARC India’s count of households that own a TV set kept rising even as phones spread.
Did you know?
The first picture Kenjiro Takayanagi put on an electronic screen, on Christmas Day 1926, was a single Japanese letter: イ.
Baird’s first greyscale TV star was a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill.
The first wireless remote, Zenith’s Flash-Matic, could not tell its beam from sunlight, so TVs sometimes changed channel on their own.
In India’s 1975 satellite experiment, 200 to 600 people at first crowded around a single TV set.
Kálmán Tihanyi’s 1926 TV camera patent is on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
The people
1860 – 1940 · Inventor · Germany
Patented the spinning scanning disc as a 23-year-old student.
1850 – 1918 · Physicist · Germany
Built the first cathode-ray tube in 1897 and shared a Nobel Prize for radio in 1909.
1869 – 1933 · Physicist · Russia
Showed crude images on a cathode-ray tube in 1911 and taught Zworykin.
1888 – 1946 · Inventor · Scotland
Gave the first public demonstration of live moving television in 1926.
1899 – 1990 · Engineer · Japan
Showed the letter イ on a cathode-ray tube in 1926; the father of Japanese television.
1906 – 1971 · Inventor · USA
Sent the first all-electronic TV picture at 21, after dreaming up scanning as a farm boy.
1908 – 2006 · Lab partner and draughtswoman · USA
Worked in the lab from the start and is among the first people ever shown on electronic TV.
1897 – 1947 · Physicist and engineer · Hungary
Patented the charge-storage camera idea in 1926 that made electronic cameras sensitive.
1888 – 1982 · Engineer · Russia and USA
Led the team that built the iconoscope camera tube at Westinghouse and RCA.
1919 – 1971 · Physicist and space pioneer · India
Championed India’s satellite TV experiment, which ran after his death.
1936 – 2014 · Engineer · USA
Led the RCA team that showed the first liquid crystal displays in 1968.
born 1947 · Chemist · Hong Kong
Built the first practical OLED at Kodak with Steven Van Slyke in 1987.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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