Few inventions have had
as much effect on contemporary American society as television. Before 1947 the
number of U.S. homes with television sets could be measured in the thousands.
By the late 1990s, 98 percent of U.S. homes had at least one television set,
and those sets were on for an average of more than seven hours a day. The typical
American spends (depending on the survey and the time of year) from two-and-a-half
to almost five hours a day watching television. It is significant not only that
this time is being spent with television but that it is not being spent engaging
in other activities, such as reading or going out or socializing. Electronic television was
first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927. The system
was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived
in a house without electricity until he was 14. While still in high school,
Farnsworth had begun to conceive of a system that could capture moving images
in a form that could be coded onto radio waves and then transformed back into
a picture on a screen. Boris Rosing in Russia had conducted some crude experiments
in transmitting images 16 years before Farnsworth's first success. Also, a mechanical
television system, which scanned images using a rotating disk with holes arranged
in a spiral pattern, had been demonstrated by John Logie Baird in England and
Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States earlier in the 1920s. However,
Farnsworth's invention, which scanned images with a beam of electrons, is the
direct ancestor of modern television. The first image he transmitted on it was
a simple line. Soon he aimed his primitive camera at a dollar sign because an
investor had asked, "When are we going to see some dollars in this thing, Farnsworth?" RCA, the company that dominated
the radio business in the United States with its two NBC networks, invested
$50 million in the development of electronic television. To direct the effort,
the company's president, David Sarnoff, hired the Russian-born scientist Vladimir
Kosma Zworykin, who had participated in Rosing's experiments. In 1939, RCA televised
the opening of the New York World's Fair, including a speech by President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who was the first president to appear on television. Later
that year RCA paid for a license to use Farnsworth's television patents. RCA
began selling television sets with 5 by 12 in (12.7 by 25.4 cm) picture tubes.
The company also began broadcasting regular programs, including scenes captured
by a mobile unit and, on May 17, 1939, the first televised baseball gameÑbetween
Princeton and Columbia universities. By 1941 the Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS), RCA's main competition in radio, was broadcasting two 15-minute newscasts
a day to a tiny audience on its New York television station.
No eagles are in the nest! Its weird there are usually one eagle in the nest. This time there's none i don't even see them. http://www.alcoa.com/locations/usa_davenport/en/info_page/eaglecam.asp
Andrea,
ReplyDeleteGreat post on the history of the television. I only saw some minor problems with punctuation this time.
word count 490
score 24/25
nice job
mommy :)