How long has television been around

How long has television been around

Television has been around since 1925. It was then that John Logie Baird demonstrated the first television system to the public. His system was an electro-mechanical device that used a spinning disc to create a moving image. It was used for the very first public broadcasts in 1929 by the BBC in London. 

Across the Atlantic, Philo Farnsworth was also working on similar systems, as was Vladimir Zworykin. Farnsworth carried out his first demonstration of another electro-mechanical system in 1927 but two years later, he had eliminated the moving parts and therefore is credited with the first person to produce a fully electronic television system. (Some sources say Zworykin did the same, around 1928 for RCA in New York -- he was on the east coast, and Farnsworth was on the west coast, but both were experimenting with electronic, rather than mechanical TV.) 

By the mid 1930s, the BBC had given up on Baird's system and replaced it with a fully electronic version. Baird and Farnsworth worked together in a bid to use their new system but the BBC chose a competitive system. The BBC first went on the air with regular programming in 1936 (the opening song was "Magic Rays of Light"). 

In America, scheduled public broadcasts did not start until 1939, at the New York World's Fair, where NBC debuted its WNBT-TV. This was partly due to additional development work by Farnsworth but legal challenges to patents were the major factor in the delay. American TV did not really take off in availability and popularity till after World War II has ended, at which time, a number of stations in most major cities went on the air.