ABSTRACT
Contrary to the body of popular general knowledge that goes to make up the questions on Trivial Pursuit cards, there was no one person who can be said to have invented television. One particular person, John Logie Baird, was the first to get it to work and make the world aware of what he had done, but he was building on the important achievements of others, without which probably he would hardly have been remembered at all. It was a very logical progression after the invention of radio to think about how nice it would be to transmit pictures over the airwaves, or even along a length of wire. But electronics had not progressed to a sufficiently sophisticated level to make this possible. The cathode ray tube, around which most television receivers and video monitors are based, was first developed by William Crookes in the 1860s, and that important device the triode vacuum tube was invented by Lee De Forest in 1906. The main stumbling block was a detector for the television camera, and if one of these could have been time-warped back to the beginning of the century we would have had a satisfactory television system in operation very much sooner. Because of the impracticality of electronic television in the early days, the only other option was to do it mechanically, and this was developed into a system that was actually used for early experimental television broadcasts.
