The Story of Television

The history of television produced by RCA in 1956. This is TV history according to RCA, focusing on the technological advances that could be attributed to RCA and de-emphasizing everything else. A lot of TV "firsts" are shown: first president to be televised, first televised baseball game, etc. David Sarnoff talks with Vladimir Zworykin about television's early development at RCA. The last third of the film suddenly breaks into color to talk about the development of color television.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• vintage
• television

[Studdells]

Not real history. A corporate self-publicity advertisement.

Sarnoff bitterly fought for a monopoly but could not buy out the Farnsworth patents for electronic television of 1928. They at RCA agreed finally to pay him fees in 1939.

The tube that Zworykin shmmelessly shows as "his" invention is something that he copied, badly, from Farnsworth, and its imperfections forced them to use Farnsworth superior original.. The image orthiticon that he claims as the first was NOT the first.

It's crazy.

[boilinabag]

i also think tesla was the one who invented the electron gun. tesla invented everything and no one knows it....

[kr3ml]

@Studdells When and how did he "copy" Farnsworths invention? And please give me reliable sources and not some accusations by other people.

[blaenllechau]

Where is John Loguie Baird? The British inventor who first demonstrated TV in the mid to late 1920s.

American crappy history as usual.

[mediawest]

tesla invented everything. 

[supernumery]

No mention of J L Baird or the BBC's first ever television service in 1936? No mention of EMI and the Emitron camera? No mention of the Marconi-EMI system? No mention of the 'CBS' partly mechanical system that CBS shamelessly stole from J L Baird? No, America invented everything..in your dreams...

[BobWXXI]

The first part is pure PR, more than a little light on fact (and on credit to others who played a significant part in TV's development,  including Philo Farnsworth and others). In fairness, the RCA/NBC people DID play the principle role in making COLOR television possible. They pushed aside a partly mechanical CBS system which would have been a dead end.

Of course, today's digital high resolution TV has obsoleted everything.

NBC announcer Mel Brandt did the voice-over.

[tryggda]

@imageorth Your technical details are mostly correct but the film and its "we invented it all alone" is simply RCA corporate dishonesty. Besides, the Zworykin 1923 patent contained--according to full patent hearing in 1938--contained Farnsworth 1928 patent element that it needed to work---and so had to pay licensing fee to Farnsworth. (Oddly, Briton Campbell-Swinton described it in '08 but never built a model!)

[yusexp]

even thougth is an american corporative video i like it very muchhh

[krooz45]

the vid started in black and white and suddenly changed to color

[imageorth]

Zworykin did not copy Farnsworth's tube. Zworykin's iconoscope and Farnsworth's image dissector were quite different. But Farnsworth in 1926 had the first working tube. The iconoscope came in the early thirties, not 1923.

The iconoscope had storage capability, making it more sensitive. Farnworth's tube was never really suited for live TV. Later, when the more sensitive Image-orthicon was developed, RCA needed Farnsworth's "electron-image" concept, which they paid Farnsworth to use.