Overview

The invention of television has exerted a profound and wide-reaching effect on the nature and quality of modern everyday life. More vivid than radio, more intimate than film, television became one of the central and most significant technologies of the twentieth century. Television took a long time to reach maturity, as it required the technology to broadcast as well as receive images, along with the cooperation of government and commercial interests to coordinate the supply of programming. But once television broadcasting became a reality and television sets were for sale to the average home, it quickly became the primary source for entertainment and information, first in the United States and England, and eventually throughout the world.

Background

Television—a term first used in 1900—lived in the imaginations of inventors and writers long before it became a technological reality. The desire to...