Probably no other invention in history has been so hotly disputed as the prestigious claim to the invention of 'Tele-vision or 'long-distance sight' by wireless.” On December 2, 1922, in Sorbonne, France, Edwin Belin, an Englishman, who held the patent for the transmission of photographs by wire as well as fiber optics and radar, demonstrated a mechanical scanning device that was an early precursor to modern television. Belin’s machine took flashes of light and directed them at a selenium element connected to an electronic device that produced sound waves. These sound waves could be received in another location and remodulated into flashes of light on a mirror. Up until this point, the concept behind television was established, but it wasn’t until electronic scanning of imagery (the breaking up of images into tiny points of light for transmission over radio waves), was invented, that modern television received its start. But here is where the controversy really heats up. The credit as to who was the inventor of modern television really comes down to two different people in two different places both working on the same problem at about the same time: Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, a Russian-born American inventor working for Westinghouse, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a privately backed farm boy from the state of Utah. Zworykin is usually credited as being the father of modern television. This was because the patent for the heart of the TV, the electron scanning tube, was first applied for by Zworykin in 1923, under the name of an iconoscope. The iconoscope was an electronic image scanner - essentially a primitive television camera. Farnsworth was the first of the two inventors to successfully demonstrate the transmission of television signals, which he did on September 7, 1927, using a scanning tube of his own design. Farnsworth received a patent for his electron scanning tube in 1930. Zworykin was not able to duplicate Farnsworth’s achievements until 1934 and his patent for a scanning tube was not issued until 1938. The truth of the matter is this, that while Zworykin applied for the patent for his iconoscope in 1923, the invention was not functional until some years later and all earlier efforts were of such poor quality that Westinghouse officials ordered him to work on something “more useful.” In the late thirties, when RCA and Zworykin, who was now working for RCA, tried to claim rights to the essence of television, it became evident that Farnsworth held the priority patent in the technology. The president of RCA sought to control television the same way that they controlled radio and vowed that, “RCA earns royalties, it does not pay them,” and a 50 million dollar legal battle subsequently ensued. In the height of the legal battle for patent priority, Farnsworth’s high school science teacher was subpoenaed and traveled to Washington to testify that as a 14 year old, Farnsworth had shared his ideas of his television scanning tube with his teacher. With patent priority status ruled in favor of Farnsworth, RCA for the first time in its history, began paying royalties for television in 1939. Philo Farnsworth was recently named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Greatest Scientists and Thinkers of the 20th Century.

Paul Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884. A. A. Campbell Swinton wrote a letter to Nature on the 18th June 1908 describing his concept of electronic television using the cathode ray tube invented by Karl Ferdinand Braun. He lectured on the subject in 1911 and displayed circuit diagrams. An interesting site: http://www.earlytelevision.org/pendletonpaper.html

It is undisputed that the British Inventor John Logie Baird obtained the worlds first TV picture. 80% of all useful things have been invented in Britain.

Television — Inventor: John Logie Baird

The love of my life, he should forever be known as the father of lazy afternoons

Television was not invented by a single person, but by several individuals. The origins of what would become today's television system can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873 followed by the work on the telectroscope and the invention of the scanning disk by Paul Nipkow in 1884. All practical television systems use the fundamental idea of scanning an image to produce a time series signal representation. That representation is then transmitted to a device to reverse the scanning process. The final device, the television (or TV set), relies on the human eye to integrate the result into a coherent image.Electromechanical techniques were developed from the 1900s into the 1920s, progressing from the transmission of still photographs, to live still duotone images, to moving duotone or silhouette images, with each step increasing the sensitivity and speed of the scanning photoelectric cell. John Logie Baird gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system that transmitted live moving images with tone graduation (grayscale) on 26 January 1926 at his laboratory in London, and built a complete experimental broadcast system around his technology. Baird further demonstrated the world's first color television transmission on 3 July 1928. Other prominent developers of mechanical television included Charles Francis Jenkins, who demonstrated a primitive television system in 1923, Frank Conrad who demonstrated a movie-film-to-television converter at Westinghouse in 1928, and Frank Gray and Herbert E. Ives at Bell Labs who demonstrated wired long-distance television in 1927 and two-way television in 1930.Color television systems were invented and patented even before black-and-white television was working; see History of television for details. Completely electronic television systems relied on the inventions of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin and others to produce a system suitable for mass distribution of television programming. Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on 25 August 1934. All modern television systems derive directly from Farnsworth's model. Regular broadcast programming occurred in the United States,[1] the United Kingdom,[2] Germany,[3] France,[4] and the Soviet Union[5] before World War II. The first regular television broadcast began in Germany in 1935, using first an electronic system with 180 lines, followed in 1937 with an improved system with 441 lines. The first regular television broadcasts with a modern level of definition (240 or more lines) were made in England in 1936, soon upgraded to the so-called "System A" with 405 lines. Regular network broadcasting began in the United States in 1946, and television became common in American homes by the middle 1950s. While North American over-the-air broadcasting was originally free of direct marginal cost to the consumer (i.e., cost in excess of acquisition and upkeep of the hardware) and broadcasters were compensated primarily by receipt of advertising revenue, increasingly United States television consumers obtain their programming by subscription to cable television systems or direct-to-home satellite transmissions. In the United Kingdom, France, and most of the rest of Europe, on the other hand, operators of television equipment must pay an annual license fee, which is usually used to fund (wholely or partly) the appropriate national public service broadcaster/s (e.g. British Broadcasting Corporation, France Télévisions, etc.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

Philo Farnsworth of Beaver, Utah.

John Logie Baird

I don't know for sure, but I can recall that the first television or televisor came up as an accident , mainly invented for the purpose of image projection (like the over head projector) and it became a motion picture device.

John Logie Baird was born on 14 August 1888 in Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland, the son of a clergyman. Dogged by ill health for most of his life, he nonetheless showed early signs of ingenuity, rigging up a telephone exchange to connect his bedroom to those of his friends across the street. His studies at Glasgow University were interrupted by the outbreak of World War One. Rejected as unfit for the forces, he served as superintendent engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. When the war ended he set himself up in business, with mixed results. Baird then moved to the south coast of England and applied himself to creating a television, a dream of many scientists for decades. His first crude apparatus was made of odds and ends but by 1924 he managed to transmit a flickering image across a few feet. On 26 January 1926 he gave the world's first demonstration of true television before fifty scientists in an attic room in central London. In 1927 his television was demonstrated over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow, and he formed the Baird Television Development Company. (BTDC). In 1928 the BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. He also gave the first demonstration of both colour and stereoscopic television. In 1929 the German post office gave him the facilities to develop an experimental television service based on his mechanical system, the only one operable at the time. Sound and vision were initially sent alternately, and only began to be transmitted simultaneously from 1930. However, Baird's mechanical system was rapidly becoming obsolete as electronic systems were developed, chiefly by Marconi in America. Although he had invested in the mechanical system in order to achieve early results, Baird had also been exploring electronic systems from an early stage. Nevertheless, a BBC committee of inquiry in 1935 prompted a side-by-side trial between Marconi's all-electronic television system, which worked on 405 lines to Baird's 240. Marconi won, and in 1937 Baird's system was dropped. Baird died on 14 June 1946 in Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/baird_logie.shtml

A guy with nothing to do at night. Invention: was the contribution of many check the link http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae408.cfm

An Italian Inventor, his name was Telee Visio. True I swear!

With out doubt John logie Baird invented Television and was the first in the world to have a television station up and running. He worked alone and without any funding. His first instrument relied heavily on bicycle parts such as gears and chains. The first scanning lenses were from bicycle front lights which accounted for some of the distortion in early transmissions. He died in the year 1946 but had high definition, 3D, color television up and running enough to demonstrate it before he died. I am John Logie Bairds illegitimate son and know how to make 3D television but have the same problems as father, lack of funds, and a disinterest word. After television was broadcasting it was quickly improved upon by the big financial backers. I will post some pictures of my mother taken by my father. Gordon Mays Baird Web sites: gordonsoflondon.com bairdinvents.com bairdinvent.com Please go to the websites to see the photographs as I cannot upload my pictures

Who else... An Englishman called Baird.. We evented everything we are hella-smart...:D

SOME FACTS The Wright brothers were the first to fly with powered flight. That makes them the inventors of powered flight. Today Boeing have over the years improved the airplane. This in no way possibly means that the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight. John Logie Baird was the first to get television working and set up a transmitting station. The idea has been improved upon, with one company spending 75million in the 1950's. This changes nothing. Fact John Logie Baird invented television working alone!

Baird was the only individual private witness to the Hankey Committee, which endorsed his proposal for a 1,000-line, three-dimensional colour system as the new post-war standard for British TV. But when Baird died two months after the Hankey Report was published, these plans never got off the ground, and the US moved in for the kill. Although he died in 1946, John’s invention arguably had a greater impact on home life than anything else in history. David Sarnoff of RCA boasted in 1954, that RCA, a huge multi-national company, had spent $75 million to develop colour television and employed hundreds of research scientists in the process. The contrast to John Logie Baird, who developed it ten years earlier for less than $20,000, paid out of his own pocket, with two employed assistants, is quite astounding. If that isn’t a demonstration of genius then I do not understand the term. (RCA referred to the Telechrome and Baird’s patents as prior art in their patent application).

SOME FACTS The Wright brothers were the first to fly with powered flight. That makes them the inventors of powered flight. Today Boeing have over the years improved the airplane. This in no way possibly means that the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight. John Logie Baird was the first to get television working and set up a transmitting station. The idea has been improved upon, with one company spending 75million in the 1950's. This changes nothing. Fact John Logie Baird invented television working alone! The pictures are of my mother Kathleen Faux who was live in housekeeper for John Logie baird

Philo Farnsworth in 1927 (?)

John Yogi Bear I think!

John Logie Baird

Unfortunately Marconi,and his invention helped waste more time than any product in the history of mankind.

As a working historian and media chronicler for the last 40 years, with an educational background in electrical engineering, I would have to say that "the inventor of television" all depends on definitions. Let's look at the definitions of two words by one of the most authoritative arbiters of the English language, the "Concise Oxford Dictionary": First, the word "invent": "v.t. create by thought, originate... concoct..." However, most people would consider that invention involves more than just the conception of a plan, more than mere speculation on paper. For the thing to be truly INVENTED by a person, it has to be DEMONSTRATED by that person. For example, Charles Cros narrowly beat Thomas Edison to the CONCEPTION of a phonograph; but Edison, in 1877, was the first to DEMONSTRATE it. Therefore Edison is generally considered to be the phonograph's inventor. Radio? Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of "Hertzian" or "radio" waves, but Marconi applied it to a practical signalling system, so Marconi is generally considered to be the inventor of radio. So let's look at the Oxford Dictionary definition of the word "television": "n. System for reproducing actual or recorded scene at a distance on a screen etc. by radio transmission, usu. with appropriate sounds; vision of distant objects obtained thus: televised programs etc..." In terms of mere conception, there are many claimants to the invention of television systems which were eventually combined with other components to achieve television. Nipkow (1883) invented the scanning disc eventually employed by the earliest television systems. Moore (1917)invented the low-voltage neon modulated used with that disc to receive the earliest television pictures. C F Jenkins (1923) transmitted moving pictures scanned from film, but these were usually simple silhouettes, not "live" three dimensional subjects. So who was first to assemble a television system and demonstrate it to be capable of transmitting real-time three-dimensional objects, in movement, with a full range of grey scale tones, by reflected light? We MUST give credit to John Logie Baird and his first demonstration of the transmission of a dummy's head - as well as his own head and William Taynton's, in October 1925. The fact that later, electronic (cathode ray tube) systems of television by Zworykin, Farnsworth et al eventually outmoded these earlier TV systems with their mechanical scanners does not detract from Baird's claim to invention. Baird, in October 1925, came first. Present radio techniques owe little to Marconi's spark-and-coherer methods of the 1890s; modern railways work on an entirely different principle to Stephenson's steam-powered "Rocket" locomotive. But the perseption of invention must lie with those earlier techniques. For that matter, modern CCD cameras and LCD screens have only the vaguest relationship with the cathode ray tube of Zworykin or Farnsworth. In the case of DLP micromirror TV projectors, the display device IS mechanical. Mechanical television also survives in receivers designed for public places, such as the DynaScan, refer: http://www.dynascanusa.com So pardon this historian - an Australian with no particular affiliation to any of these inventors' countries of origin - for sticking his neck out quite categorically and saying, ON THE BASIS OF THESE DEFINITIONS, IT'S BAIRD! Regards to all, Christopher Long, amateur radio operator VK3AML, Melbourne, Australia.

The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird.

The Scotsman John Logie Baird invented television in the 1920s, The first concept of the television was a sketch done by a 14-year-old farm boy named Philo T. Farnsworth in 1922. On September 7, 1927, he finally created a television system that could not only display, but transmit signals between seperate rooms

Philo Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworth who became the first inventor to transmit a television image in 1927

Philo Farnsworth made the world's first working television system with electronic scanning of both the pickup and display devices, which he first demonstrated to news media ...

Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin; First CRT TV Philo Farnsworth; First completely electronic TV John Logie Baird; The fist color TV

A Scotsman called John Logie Baird invented the first (Working Television System)