Television History: From Invention to Public Consciousness

Introduction: A Familiar Yet Unexpected History

The history of television is at once familiar and unexpected. Like every new medium, television experienced a period when it was simultaneously written off as a fad and hailed as a world-changing wave of the future. The truth was somewhat more nuanced, because although television did change the world in serious, wide-ranging ways, it did not do so in the way many early critics and theorists suspected. By examining the evolution of television — including the context of its invention and its impact on other media — it becomes possible to better understand not only how the history of television exemplifies the development of all new mediums, from the novel to video games, but also how the unique qualities of television and its effect on the public consciousness shaped the contemporary world by transitioning humanity from structured monopolies to anarchistic experimentation.

Technological Origins and Early Development

Like many inventions arising out of the intense scientific interest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, television as a technology was not the result of a single innovation. Rather, it emerged from the combined efforts of a number of individuals and organizations reaching all the way back to the first experiments in photography (Armes, 1988, p. 12). Like the myriad machines and devices constructed to play and record audio, the first televisions and television broadcasts were all slightly different, each based on the specific designs of whichever scientist or inventor happened to create it (Edgerton, 2007, p. 3). Film production and exhibition was ramping up at the same time that these early television prototypes were being developed, so it is understandable that the public was not particularly interested in television during the early years of the twentieth century. The idea of transmitting images via electromagnetic waves in a manner similar to radio, though novel, did not appear to threaten the hegemony of film — especially because the earliest television prototypes could not transmit moving images.

It was not until the 1920s that live, moving images became possible, but even then the audience and the broadcasting power were simply not great enough to spark a true change. The first television broadcasts in 1928 were crude, with resolution far below what would be considered the bare minimum today, but they kicked off a gradual process of refinement and development (Huff, 2001, p. 111). General Electric's 1928 broadcasts were at thirty lines of resolution, meaning they could transmit only thirty vertical lines of black on a white background; by 1935, Great Britain was setting broadcast standards at 240 lines of resolution (Huff, 2001, p. 111). The evolution was slow compared to the exponential developments in media and technology of the twenty-first century, but television broadcasts gradually became easy enough and of sufficient quality to break into the media landscape. All that was needed now was an audience — and the actual television sets to watch on.

RCA, NBC, and Television's Public Debut

Like any new medium, television ultimately required the financial backing of existing media powers to succeed, and it found that support in the form of the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA — whose name today is synonymous with television rather than radio (Edgerton, 2007, p. 3). RCA was headed by David Sarnoff, who had gotten his start working for Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph (Edgerton, 2007, p. 4). When Marconi's American holdings were spun off into a separate company, Sarnoff became the head of what would eventually become RCA. Arguably one of the most important decisions made after RCA's formation was the establishment of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1926, a broadcasting subsidiary that could also be used to market and sell the radios manufactured by RCA (Edgerton, 2007, p. 5). Sarnoff parlayed NBC's success to generate public interest in television, so that by 1939 the public had already experienced "the most extensive and ballyhooed series of public relations events ever staged around any mass medium in American history" (Edgerton, 2007).

Even so, World War II effectively disrupted television's rollout, such that it would not become "the dominant mass medium in the United States" until well into the 1950s (Slotten, 2000, p. 68). However, this interruption probably helped television's reception in the long run, because its ascendance during the 1950s was partly due to its role as a status symbol — the technological centerpiece of the new, modern home emerging from the devastation of the war. Indeed, one can argue that just as "the end of the First World War gave a stimulus to developments in radio, […] the conclusion of the Second World War initiated the inexorable spread of television world-wide" (Armes, 1988, p. 114).

Conclusion: Television's Singular Contribution

Tracing the evolution of television allows one to better understand not only how new mediums are developed, but also how television uniquely affected the public consciousness. On the one hand, television's evolution bears striking resemblance to the development of other mediums such as film and radio, because it was shaped by the same factors — namely, economics and warfare. On the other hand, television is unique because, unlike these earlier media, it was developed within the context of a preexisting mass media environment rather than as a foundational element of one. This simultaneously allowed television to debut to a much wider audience and to affect the public consciousness in unexpected ways, by taking the uniform experience of radio and segmenting it for a larger and more varied viewership.

When considered in the context of the twentieth century as a whole, and the rapid technological changes that occurred over the course of that century, it becomes apparent that television's greatest and most singular contribution was the way it transitioned both the production and reception of art and entertainment away from the structured standards of radio, film, and newspapers and toward the kind of free-wheeling development that has only seen its true maturation with the rise of the internet. In this sense, television did not merely entertain — it reshaped the relationship between media and society in ways whose full implications continue to unfold today.

References

Armes, R. (1988). On video. London: Routledge.

Edgerton, G. (2007). The Columbia history of American television. New York: Columbia University Press.

Huff, W. A. (2001). Regulating the future: Broadcasting technology and governmental control. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Slotten, H. (2000). Radio and television regulation: Broadcast technology in the United States, 1920–1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.