Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971) was an American inventor. He is best known for inventing the first fully electronic television system, including the first working electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), and for being the first to demonstrate fully electronic television to the public.
There is no one inventor but John Logie Baird, Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykyn all made significant contributions. And there was corporate development at such places as RCA where teams of engineers solved problems.
The original televisions were mechanical that relied on spinning disks to create the scanlines. The camera units were often as big as the room. All electronic scanning developed in the late 20's and television was semi-practical by the mid-30's.
The German system used during the Nazi era proved to be more adept at transmitting filmed images than live out of a camera. So the Germans built remote trucks for the 1936 Olympics that would shoot film from a camera mounted on the roof, develop it in the truck and run the film wet into a telecine and transmitted. It was tape delay before tape.
All television experimentation stopped for the duration of WWII. The postwar years saw the analog standards adopted that would last for the next 60 years.
CBS Labs created a mechanical color system that was adopted and then rejected by the FCC because it was incompatible with the B&W standard so many had invested in. When the government reversed its decision, CBS founder William Paley had to sallow his pride and buy color equipment from RCA, the parent company of bitter rival NBC.
Analog television in America, the NTSC standard will almost completely disappear in June 2009. Only low power community television will continue to broadcast it.
There were actually several people who "invented" television. One was a Morman (at the ripe old age of 14) called Farnsworth. Another was a Scottish man called John Baird.
