Most television owners know very little about their set. In fact, they may spend thousands of dollars on a TV that they know nothing about. Learning a little bit about the history of television lends a bit of appreciation to owning a set. This is just a rough history of the first few decades of television technology and how it affected the TV sets you see in the stores and might have purchased in your home over the years.

The beginning of television started in the late 1800s when Willoughby Smith discovered the properties of photo-conductivity within Selenium. Scanning disks were then created by Paul Niphow in 1884, and he began the development of what is considered the first image rasterizer. At the 1900 International World Fair, Constantin Perskyi came up with the phrase "television," after mentioning the different developments by Smith and Niphow. The first images combined by the technologies developed by Niphow and Smith were still photographs transmitted over phone lines and the telegraph.

Until 1907, the actual design of a television was not possible. Tube technology was created and applied to the current electromechanical properties behind sharing images. Georges Rignoux used a mirror-drum that rotated to scan images in a matrix of Selenium cells. Braun tubes, predecessors to the cathode ray tubes, were used by Boris Rosing and his students in 1911 to transmit still images over electric wires. Since the Selenium cells were still not sensitive enough to moving imagery, only stills could be transmitted from point A and then received at point B.

The 1920s saw several breakthroughs by John Baird in regards to transmitting signals. In October of 1925, Baird was able to transmit moving gray-scaled images and demonstrated this to the public in London. His crude set-up used 30 lines of movement, a double set of spiral lenses and was able to produce enough movement to showcase a human face. By 1927, Baird transmitted a single signal over 400 miles from London to Glasgow over telephone lines. Baird's first broadcast over the atlantic occurred in 1928, transmitting a signal from London to New York, via a ship. His transmission contained the first use of electromechanical coloring via the use of more discs and filters than his gray-scaled demonstration used. He was the pioneer behind the first live broadcast in England, occurring in 1931, of the Epsom Derby. By 1932, he was showcasing short-wave television broadcasts throughout London and the countryside.

Meanwhile, in the US, Charles Jenkins showcased silhouette images in motion from a navy radio station in his laboratory. He used a disk scanner with 48 lines, moving 16 pictures per second. By 1927, AT&T's Bell Telephone began transmitting half-tone images and began field testing reflective-light television systems in small and large scales. They used wire links from Washington to other locations, broadcasting from a central point of origin in New Jersey.

During the early 1900s, Alan Campbell-Swinton spoke on how CRTs could be used in both the transmission and receiving process for televisions. Some during the time had already begun to experiment with CRT technology but none had managed to figure out exactly how to get both processes to work seamlessly at the same time. Others during this time came to the conclusion that only by utilizing electron emissions would they be able to do both. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth's camera tube was able to transmit its imagery in a straight line. By the following year, he was using motion pictures to showcase the technology.

Farnsworth successfully demonstrated the first all-electron television in 1934 at the Franklin Institute. Others had shown bits and parts of the overall system but nothing as complete as Farnsworth presented. RCA eventually bought out Farnsworth's patents to create the first CRT-based televisions. By 1944, Baird began demonstrating a color television display with over 600 lines. It utilized triple interlacing based on six scans to build the overall display picture.

By 1929 in America, Bell Laboratories used three separate systems of electric cells to create the reds, greens and blues to create a single color image. Other companies fought for patents and approval from the Federal Communications Commission. In 1940, RCA showed the FCC their first color television. By the 1940s, CBS began experimenting with different color schemes and techniques for its live broadcasts. CBS used discs made of red, blue and green filters spinning into the camera and another disc inside its CRT-based receiver to capture the imagery. NBC began broadcasting color field tests in 1941. Since these color tests were not compatible with the black and white televisions being used, only a select portion of the population was able to actually witness the tests.

This is just a part of the early history of television between England and the United States. Everyday new technologies and developments are being made with televisions, and it is only a matter of time before these are showcased in homes around the world. Everything from plasmas to LCDs started somewhere, and this basic history is just a little part of that.