preview

The History of Television Essay

Best Essays

Many Americans today go home and flip on the television, but many do not take the time to think about the complexity of this great invention that is common to us. Nearly sixty years ago television barely existed and was not thought to be used as a broad communicator like it is used in today’s generation. Through its starting, stopping, then restarting in the 1940’s, television took off and expanded greatly in just a few short decades and had great technological breakthroughs to allow it a widespread range of uses. Though technologies existed in the forties, the great advancement and possibility that television would have, were not yet explored. Just as the radio, television was a process being experimented with, worked, and transformed …show more content…

America as a whole was still on edge of this new breakthrough, much like the decades before when they first experienced the radio. David Sarnoff, under employment at RCA, an invested radio company who took great interest in the television realm, thought to change the perception of how many people viewed television. Instead of making it just for informational guidance, he wanted to make it a part of every day life for Americans. With the help of his company he developed tubes, lenses, cameras, and other new tools in technology that later led to the great development we have today. At the end of the decade RCA had more than 3 experimental versions of television sets with color. By the end of the 40’s the television industry had been well established. In 1947, President Harry Truman delivered his state of the union address and the baseball World Series were both televised. There were three major networks in America that had successful lineups. NBC, CBS, and DuMont were the most successful. Both CBS and NBC networks began a nightly fifteen-minute segment newscast. In 1949, the price of TV sets went down, leading to Americans purchasing 100,00 sets per week. Growing away from their once reservation of television, many Americans were starting to see the value of television between its use of communication and the use of generating a profit from it. “The high demand for television sets grew to a mandate of television programs in

Get Access