Early TVs

"Children will go to school in their own living rooms...Housewives will see on the screen... and shop by phone," exclaimed Time Magazine in 1948. Television will "change Americans into creatures with... no brain at all," lamented radio star Fred Allen in 1950. No matter how you look at it, TV has changed our world.

The Invention

• The invention of the TV was not the work of any one person, but a combination of ideas and inventions over a period of time. Charles Jenkins displayed moving images of President Herbert Hoover on his mechanical "radiovision" in 1923. Philo Taylor Farnsworth demonstrated his "image dissector" in 1927, the first successful exhibition of the electronic television.

Function

• Farnsworth's invention remains the crux of the electronic TV. His dissector tube used an "anode finger" to scan electronic images; magnetized coils diffused electronic currents to a cathode-ray tube and onto a fluorescent screen.

Design

• Early electronic TVs were cumbersome wooden boxes from which tiny green glass screens protruded. The first color TV was demonstrated in 1946. Zenith introduced the first remote control, called the "Space Commander," in 1957.

Influence

• World War II slowed the development of the TV, but by 1950, television had replaced radio as the communication medium of choice. According to the FCC, by 1960 85 percent of U.S. households had a television set.