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The Development of Television Technology
Radio and television were major agents of social change in the 20th century. Radio was once the center for family entertainment and news. Television enhanced this revolution by adding sight to sound. Both opened the windows to other lives, to remote areas of the world, and to history in the making. News coverage changed from early and late editions of newspapers to broadcast coverage from the scene. Play-by-play sports broadcasts and live concerts enhanced entertainment coverage. For many, the only cultural performances or sports events they would ever hear or see would emanate from the speakers or the screens in their living rooms. Each has engaged millions of people in the major historical events that have shaped the world.
If people could look at the sky and see how it is organized into frequency bands used for different purposes, they would be amazed. Radio waves crisscross the atmosphere at the speed of light, relaying incredible amounts of information---navigational data, radio signals, television pictures--using devices for transmission and reception designed, built, and refined by a century of engineers.
Key figures in the late 1800s included Nikola Tesla, who developed the Tesla coil, and James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, who proved mathematically the possibility of transmitting electromagnetic signals between widely separated points. It was Guglielmo Marconi who was most responsible for taking the theories of radio waves out of the laboratory and applying them to practical devices. His "wireless" telegraph demonstrated its great potential for worldwide communication in 1901 by sending a signal--the letter "s"--in Morse code a distance of 2,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Radio technology was just around the comer.
Immediate engineering challenges addressed the means of transmitting and receiving coded messages, and developing a device that could convert a high frequency oscillating signal into an electric current capable of registering as sound. The first significant development was "the Edison effect", the discovery that the carbon filament in the electric light bulb could radiate a stream of electrons to a nearby test electrode if it had a positive charge. In 1904, Sir John Ambrose Fleming of Britain took this one step further by developing the diode which allowed electric current to be detected by a telephone receiver. Two years later, American Lee De Forest developed the triode, introducing a third electrode (the grid) between the filament and the plate. It could amplify a signal to make live voice broadcasting possible, and was quickly added to Marconi’s wireless telegraph to produce the radio.
Radio development was hampered by restrictions placed on airwaves during World War I. Technical limitations were also a problem. Few people had receivers, and those that did had to wear headsets. Radio was seen by many as a hobby for telegraphy buffs. It would take a great deal of engineering before the radio would become the unifying symbol of family entertainment and the medium for news that was its destiny.
In the mid-1920s, technical developments expanded transmission distances, radio stations were built across the country, and the performance and appearance of the radio were improved. With tuning circuits, capacitors, microphones, oscillators, and loudspeakers, the industry blossomed in just a decade. By the mid-1930s almost every American household had a radio. The advent of the transistor in the 1950s completely transformed its size, style, and portability.
Both television and radar were logical spin-offs of the radio. Almost 50 years before television became a reality, its fundamental principles had been independently developed in Europe, Russia, and the United States. John Baird in England and Charles Jenkins in the United States worked independently to combine modulated light and a scanning wheel to reconstruct a scene in line-by-line sweeps. In 1925, Baird succeeded in transmitting a recognizable image.
Philo T. Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor from Utah, patented a scanning cathode ray tube, and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA devised a superior television camera in 1930. Regularly scheduled broadcasts started shortly thereafter, and by the early 1940s there were 23 television stations in operation throughout the United States.
Shortly after World War Ⅱ, televisions began to appear on the market. The first pictures were faded and flickering, but more than a million sets were sold before the end of the decade. An average set cost $500 at a time when the average salary was less than $3,000 a year. In 1950 engineers perfected the rectangular cathode-ray tube and prices dropped to $200 per set. Within 10 years 45 million units were sold.
A study of how human vision works enabled engineers to develop television technology. Images are retained on the retina of a viewer’s eye for a fraction of a second after they strike it. By displaying images piece by piece at sufficient speed, the illusion of a complete picture can be created. By changing the image on the screen 25 to 30 times per second, movement can be realistically represented. Early scanning wheels slowly built a picture line by line. In contrast, each image on a modem color television screen is comprised of more than 100,000 picture elements (pixels), arranged in several hundred lines. The image displayed changes every few hundredths of a second. For a 15-minute newscast, the television must accurately process more than 1 billion units of information. Technical innovations that made this possible included a screen coated with millions of tiny dots of fluorescent compounds that emit light when struck by high-speed electrons.
Today this technology is in transition again, moving away from conventional television waves and on to discrete digital signals carried by fiber optics. This holds the potential for making television interactive--allowing a viewer to play a game or order action replays. Cathode ray tubes with power-hungry electron guns are giving way to liquid crystal display (LCD) panels. Movie-style wide screens and flat screens are readily available. Digital signals enable High Definition Television (HDTV) to have almost double the usual number of pixels, giving a much sharper picture. The advent of cable television and advances in fiber-optic technology will also help lift the present bandwidth restrictions and increase image quality.
According to the passage, entertainment coverage was extended by ______.