John McIntyre, age 14, of DeKalb, Ill., for his question:
WHEN WAS TELEVISION INVENTED?
Not too many people knew much about television before the first regular programs started in a few cities is the United States and Europe in the 1930s. However, the electronic system of sending pictures great distances actually started 170 years ago when a Swedish chemist named Jon Berzelius is 1818 discovered the chemical element selenium.
Later it was discovered that selenium could carry electrical current. The amount depended on the amount of light that struck it. This property in conducting materials is called photoelectricity.
In 1875 an American inventor named G.R. Carey made the first crude television system using photoelectric calls. He had a bask of photoelectric cells, side by side. As a scene was focused through a lens onto the bank, each call would control the amount of electricity it would pass on to a corresponding bank of light bulbs. The result was the projection of the original scene
Carey's apparatus was simplified in 1884 by a German inventor named Paul Nipkow, who came up with a scanning disk that sent pictures short distances. However, the picture projected was not vary clear.
In 1922, a 16 year old U.S. inventor named Phflo Farnsworth developed as electronic scanning system. And is 1923 came the most important contribution to the television of today when a Russian born American named Vladimir Zworykin invented the iconoscope and the kinescope.
The iconoscope was the first television camera tubs suitable for broadcasting arid the kinescope was the picture tube used in TV receivers.
Zworykin demonstrated the first totally electronic, practical television system in 1929.
The first American telecasts on anything like a regular schedule started in 1936. The Radio Corporation of America put TV receivers is 150 homes is the New York City area and started broadcasting programs.
The first program to appear on television was a cartoon of "Felix the Cat."
Television broadcasting ended in 1941 is the United States when World War II started. It didn't start again until the war ended in 1945.
National networks resumed broadcasting after the war but only reached the area between Boston and Washington, D.C. But by 1951, broadcasts extended from coast to coast.
Americana quickly took to TV. They liked the way entertainment, news, special events and sports programs became available. Demand for TV sets grew quickly. In 1945 there were probably about 10,000 TV sets is the country. Just five years later, in 1950, the figure had grown to about 6 million. And by 1960, just 10 years after that, the 60 million mark was passed.
Milton Berle vas the first TV entertainer to attract a large, nationwide audience. His show ran from 1948 until 1956.