In its novelty stage, television’s earliest pioneers were trying to isolate TV waves from the electromagnetic spectrum (as radio’s pioneers had done with radio waves). The big question was: If a person could transmit audio signals from one place to another, why not visual images as well? Inventors from a number of nations toyed with the idea of sending “tele-visual” images for nearly a hundred years before what we know as TV developed.

Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture

In the late 1800s, the invention of the cathode ray tube, the forerunner of the TV picture tube, combined principles of the camera and electricity. Because television images could not physically float through the air, technicians and inventors developed a method of encoding them at a transmission point (TV station) and decoding them at a reception point (TV set). In the 1880s, German inventor Paul Nipkow developed the scanning disk, a large flat metal disk with a series of small perforations organized in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, it separated pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. As the disk spun, each small hole scanned one line of a scene to be televised. For years, Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images.