Slow Development.

Although the basic components of television were developed as early as the 1870s, the technology was not sophisticated enough to broadcast an image until the 1920s. Even then television was too crude for widespread use. There were eighteen experimental television stations in the United States in 1931, but opposition to the new medium by radio broadcasters and a lack of funding during the Depression left these promising starts wanting. Nonetheless, technical innovations by inventors such as Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth refined and improved television, and RCA was ready to introduce widespread commercial manufacture of television sets by 1938. RCA's competitors opposed the deployment of a national broadcast system based on RCA technology and moved to block the licensing of commercial broadcasting by the FCC. In 1940 a government panel concluded that RCA was attempting to establish industry broadcasting standards on terms disadvantageous to...