The Role of Television in Society

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CAN 463 – The Role of Television in Society An Early History of Television in the United States (1939 – 1999) At the cost of $156 million, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows Queens (home of the US Tennis Open) in April 1939. RCA, NBC’s parent company, had chosen this event to make a public demonstration of its latest technological marvel – television. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, called the invention “a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society.” The idea of TV goes back to the 1880s. early TV pioneers such as Paul Nipkow and Boris Rosing correctly reasoned that if the elements of a visual scene could be scanned and broken down into a series of tiny electrical signals able to be transmitted and reassembled in a receiver, a viewable television picture would result. It took a while, however, to put this principle into practice. After a series of false starts with mechanical scanning system, two inventors, Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth, were able to perfect a method of electronic scanning that would eventually become the basis for modern television. Improvement in TV contined during the 1930s. Experimental TV stations went on the air. The development of a commercial TV system was interrupted by the war. Station construction was halted, and all but a handful of stations went off the air. On another front, however, World War 2 accelerated the technology behind TV. Scientists involved in perfecting TV went into the military and studied high-frequency electronics. Their work greatly improved the US system of radar and also advanced the technical side of TV. As the war neared its end, it was apparent that TV would be back, stronger than ever. When the war ended, the broadcasting industry made immediate preparations to shift its emphasis from radio to TV. Assembly lines that had been used

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