TV Retrospective: Looking Back At The History Of The Telly

Has there ever been a technology as pervasive as the television? Ever since John Logie Baird demonstrated his mechanical device that showed moving images at 12.5 frames per second in 1926, the world has had an ongoing love affair with TV. And all this month, we’re going to be looking back at how the technology that we all take for granted grew and developed into the LCDs and plasmas we use today.

Even though it was the early 1920s that the world really had its first taste of the technology that would become a television, people had been experimenting with broadcasting images over a distance since the late 1800s. A device known as the pantelegraph – like a 19th century fax machine, used wiring to transmit an image that was drawn by a three metre pendulum which “scanned” the image and synchronised that with another pantelegraph on the other end of the wire.

This device was the first example of electronically transmitting an image, but it wasn’t until 1925 and John Logie Baird that the technology had developed enough to display moving pictures. But we’ll go into that tomorrow…

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.