Friday, June 15, 2012

sUpRiSe ToPiC and Eagles

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

1 comment:

  1. Andrea,

    Great 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 :)

    ReplyDelete