ABSTRACT
Born in an experimenter’s first startling idea of sending pictures through the air, broadcast television has changed society as radically as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years before. This chapter explores how broadcast television grew from an idea to an institution. It discusses how the key TV process of scansion evolved; how business, politics, and economics helped to shape technical standards; and how programming evolved. The chapter discusses how commercial networks rose to dominate television, just as they had radio; how broadcast television was affected by scandal and corruption; and how regulatory and citizen groups worked to reform television. The crucial technical process on which modern television is founded is scansion. Scansion is the systematic and continuous translation of minute parts of an image into specific electrical charges suitable for transmission and retranslation into a series of pictures that give the illusion of motion.
