Television

Many people worked to create television. In 1862, Abbe Giovanna Caselli invented a machine called the Pantelograph. Caselli was the first person to send a picture over wires. By the 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell invented a machine that transmitted pictures and sound over wires. His machine was called the Photophone. At the World’s Fair the word television was first used. That name stuck, and is now shortened to “TV.” At the beginning of TV history, there were several types of TV technology. One system was a mechanical model based on a disc. The other system was an electronic model. In the 1920s, John Logie Baird desighned the first TV in England and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States. Philo Taylor Farnsworth also showed an electronic system in San Francisco in 1927. His TV was the prototype of today’s TV, which is an electronic system based on his ideas. Now TV is everywhere. Before 1947, there were only a few thousand televisions in the U.S. By the 1990s, there were televisions in 98% of American homes.