FAMOUS CREATION OF THE DAY THE TELEVISION This device doesnt need any introduction due to the fact

t that probably 70% of the worlds population spend half their day using it; ladies and gentlemen, its the

television

DESCRIPTION: The television

is a device used for transmitting visual images and sound that are then reproduced on screens.

HOW IT WORKS: The basic parts that make up a television are:1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Ion gun Colour filter Electromagnets/Steering coils Antenna Speakers

The brain is able to perform two major functions which enable us see moving pictures on the TV; it is able to completely reconstruct a still image which has been carefully divided into a collection of tiny coloured dots and it is also able to interpret several still pictures changed in quick succession into one moving scene.

In cathode ray tube TVs, the cathode (ion gun) which is a negatively charged filament, releases a steady stream of electrons when supplied with electricity . Located some distance away from the cathode is a pair of anodes; the focusing anode and the accelerating anode. The anodes are positively

charged and hence attract the negatively charged electrons; the focusing anode collects all the electrons into a tight beam and then passes it over to the accelerating anode. The accelerating anode then speeds up the tight beam so

that it hits the chemical-coated screen on the other end. In order to move the beam about the screen so as to create a meaningful image, steering coils, located after the anodes, are used to create magnetic fields which aid to deflect the direction of the beam; varying the voltage in the steering coils enable the beam

to be positioned anywhere on the screen. Coating the screen are colour filters or phosphors and these have the ability of emitting visible light when struck with a ray of electrons. In coloured televisions, three phosphors that emit red, blue and green light respectively are arranged in groups of dots or stripes horizontally about the screen. A shadow mask , which is essentially a metal grid , is placed before the screen so as to ensure that the beam hit exact places on the screen. The beam begins to paint the transmitted image as directed by the magnetic coils, horizontally from left to right until it gets to the bottom of the screen upon which it begins the cycle all over again. In the space of a second, the beam can paint close to 525 horizontal lines (depending on how many horizontal lines make up the TV) 30 times; if you ponder on that for a bit, you will conclude that it is a pretty impressive feat. Every colour on the spectrum can be reproduced on the screen by changing the intensity of the beam. Putting all of this together to get the big picture , the TV antenna picks up the signals transmitted by the broadcasting station and passes it along to the electric circuit present in the TV. The electric circuit then passes the video signal to the circuit controlling the steering coils and they recreate the images embedded in the signal by moving the electron beam about the screen. The sound signal is passed onto a separate audio circuit which controls the sound coming from the loudspeakers. The brain puts together the dotted images changed in quick succession as

a moving imagery scene and that is the basic principle of the TV. LCD plasma TVs apply slightly different principles but the basic idea is the same.

and

INVENTOR(S) OF THE TELEVISION: At the age of 23, a German student

by the name of Paul

Nipkow devised a means of transmitting images

electromechanically. He never got around it to building a physical structure of his idea but he was convincing enough to receive a patent for it in 1884. In 1909, the first demonstration of the transmission of still images took place in Paris and was performed by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier. In 1924, a

Hungarian inventor, Kalman Tihanyi, came up with an ingenious solution to the problem of low electrical output by low sensitive tubes by accumulating and storing charges during each scanning cycle and this gradually became incorporated in television models for clearer pictures. Further experiments on this new

technology were undertaken by Boris

Rising and his brilliant student,

Vladimar Zworykin but it wasnt until 1925 that the real possibility offered by this new technology was truly brought to the forefront by Scottish

inventor, John Logie Baird, when he gave the first public demonstration of televised images in motion in a Selfridges store in London. Later that year, an

American inventor, Charles F. Jenkins transmitted a moving image of a toy-mill in motion from a naval ship in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington which was a distance of about five miles. Vladimir Zworykin continued his research on cathode ray tubes but without his teacher this time at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation where he worked but his research however, never got beyond the laboratory stage. Baird not to be outdone, kept on working on his research and by 1927, he successfully transmitted a television signal using telephone lines between London and Glasgow which was a distance over 438 miles. In 1928, Baird broke yet another record by becoming the first person to televise with colour. Later that year, a young American inventor by the name of

Philo Farnsworth, gave a public demonstration of his own version of the television, the Image Dissector. In 1929, Farnsworth had so improved on his creation that his was completely stripped of the mechanical parts that existed in Bairds model like a motor generator and was truly electronic thus ushering in a new age of the television.

EVOLUTION OF THE TELEVISION: As is always the case, several

companies sprang up to cash in on this new technology. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) began buying up patents from Zworykin and Tihanyi and started

manufacturing television sets for commercial use. In 1933, a British company called EMI, made several strides in the television technology when they

hired Isaac Shoenberg to lead their engineering team. The engineering team successfully created a camera tube called the super Emitron which was several times more sensitive than their American counterparts and had a low ratio of interference to signal. In 1936, Kihanyi conceived the basic principle for plasma TVs thus, becoming the father for flat panel display systems. In 1964, a black and

white plasma video display was invented by Donald Blitzer, H. Gene Slottow and graduate student, Robert Willson of the University of Illinois. In the 1970s,

Burroughs Corporation developed the Panaplex display, a seven segment gas plasma display system used in their adding machines and it became the canvass on which future plasma displays were built. In 1982, IBM introduced the 19-inch black and white plasma display for their computer screens. In 1988, Sharp Corporation introduced to the market, the first commercial liquid crystal television (LCD ) model. By the 1990s all through to 2000s, LCDs had increased in popularity due to their lightweight nature and low energy consumption.

SOME BELOVED TELEVISION SERIES:

1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9)

10)

Showcaseyourcreation.blogspot.com

ONLINE SOURCES
1) 2) 3) 4) How Stuff Works: How the Television works Explain That Stuff: Television, How it works WiseGeek: How does a Television work? Wikipedia: History of the Television