Scott Lauffer, Age 10, Of Webster, N.Y.., for his question:
Who invented television?
It is hard for a young person to imagine what the world would be like without television. But a hundred years ago, no one imagined that our wonderful television system would ever be invented. Even a few years ago, when your parents were young, there were only a few people who believed that the wonderful dream could come true.
Our television is a very complicated system. It uses radio and electricity and many electronic gadgets. It could not be invented until we had 1earned how to use radio and electricity and perfected delicate gadgets such as kiuescopes, iconoscopes, cathode ray tubes, photoelectric cells. Scanners, vacuum tubes, amplifiers and. Many other items with fine sounding names.
As you know, your TV set fails if just one item breaks down. It took time to perfect each of these, and they were invented by different people in different countries at differmt times. So far as we know, the first person to dream of television was Paul Gottlelb of Germany. This was in the year 1881+.
Nipkon made a television system, but it was clumsy and not very workable. For one thing, our tv systems are run entirely by electronics. Some of the items in Nipkon's system were run by mechanical power. Nevertheless, a few people believed in the wonderful idea.
In the 1920s, some of the men who had. Helped to perfect radio put their brains to work on television. Thomas Edison, John Flemming., Lee de Forest and Henrich Hertz used their knowledge of radio to make this new dream of television come true.
Vladimir Zworykinorked to perfect the iconoscope.,.rld the kinescope. John Logie Baird in England developed a workable tv system using photoelectric cells, scanners, vacuum tubes and amplifiers. At the same time, Charles Francis Jerkins was using the same ideas to build a tv system. Philo Farnsworth invented an electronic scanner at the age of 16.
The complicated items in our tv systems were invented one by one and gradually perfected. Television became more and more workable, and, in 1933, the first all electric system was ready to go. However, the marvelous invention was delayed by world war II, and. Television sets did not become an everyday product until around 1946. And no one can say how many different people added scraps of knowledge to make it possible.
Same of the people who helped had no idea that their inventions and discoveries would lead to television. One of these was Baron Jakob Berlius of Germany who discovered the element selenium way back in 1817. Fifty years later, other scientists found that, when selenium is placed in a strong light, it becomes a powerful conductor of electricity. Still later, this information led to the invention of the photoelectric cell which happened to be one of the many items necessary to a workable television system.