Saturday, 7 September 2002

TV is 75

One steamy day in the summer of 1921, Philo criss-crossed an open field atop a horse drawn plowing machine, thinking about television to relieve the boredom, when for a moment, he stopped to survey his day's work. Noticing the neatly cut parallel rows in the dirt before him, he was struck with a flash of inspiration: just as he plowed the field, back and forth in parallel rows, so could he scan an image, one line at a time, with a magnetically-deflected beam of electrons inside a cathode ray tube. At that moment, television as we know it - and all its extensions and futher manifestations (like this computer screen) arrived on earth in the mind of this 14-year-old farm boy.