Who Invented Television? The Baird-Farnsworth Timeline

The Origin of Television: Baird’s Mechanical Disc

On January 26, 1926, in a London laboratory, John Logie Baird showed a group of Royal Institution members something that until then had only existed on paper: moving pictures sent across a distance. His system was entirely mechanical. A spinning perforated disc, known as the Nipkow disc after the German engineer who had patented the idea decades earlier, broke the live picture into 30 lines and pieced it back together on the other end.

Over the next two years Baird pushed his system well beyond the lab. Between May 24 and May 27, 1927, he sent television pictures over phone lines from London to Glasgow, a distance of 438 miles. On February 8, 1928, came an even bigger leap: a television broadcast that crossed the Atlantic. These were technical trials, not yet a public service, but they were enough to show the idea held up outside a single room.

Practical example: think of the Nipkow disc as flipping quickly through a photo album made of extremely thin strips. Each hole in the disc “reads” one horizontal slice of the picture as it spins; if the disc spins fast enough, the eye stops seeing separate strips and sees one moving picture instead.

The Electronic Path: Farnsworth and Zworykin

While Baird worked in London, two inventors in the United States were chasing a different idea: replace every moving part with an electronic tube instead. The first was Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who filed a patent application in 1927 for the image dissector, a tube built to capture pictures with no discs and no moving parts; the patent was granted in 1930. The second was Vladimir Zworykin, who worked for RCA on a rival tube, the iconoscope, with direct backing from RCA president David Sarnoff.

One source credits Zworykin with building an early iconoscope as far back as 1924, before he even joined RCA in 1929. No other source confirms that date.

The two electronic tubes were soon locked in a dispute that ended up in court. RCA, through Zworykin’s work, challenged Farnsworth’s patent claims; Farnsworth, in turn, accused Zworykin of having built RCA’s new patent partly on information gathered during a visit to his lab. The US Patent Office ruled in Farnsworth’s favor in 1934, granting him priority of invention over the image dissector; RCA appealed and lost in 1936. The dispute only closed in September 1939, when RCA agreed to a multi-year licensing deal on Farnsworth’s patent worth $1 million. It was a win on paper, but it landed after the industry had already built its commercial broadcasts around RCA’s system: the deal never shifted the market standard, which stayed Zworykin’s iconoscope.

The BBC Steps In: The Choice of 1937

On November 2, 1936, the BBC launched its first regular high-definition television service from Alexandra Palace, covering the London area. For a few months, rather than choosing right away, the BBC alternated Baird’s mechanical system with the electronic Marconi-EMI system, built around the Emitron tube, week by week; the same Marconi-EMI consortium also had a deal with Farnsworth to use his image dissector, but ruled it inferior to the Emitron because it needed far more studio light.

The head-to-head trial did not last long. On February 6, 1937, the Television Advisory Committee recommended dropping Baird’s system; the Marconi-EMI Emitron stood alone and became the foundation of British television for decades. The committee based its choice on practical performance, comparing the two broadcasts week after week.

The Beginning of Television’s Mass Audience: From First Sales to the War

The technical verdict was in. Commercial success was another matter.

On May 12, 1937, the day of King George VI’s coronation, the first major outside broadcast in electronic television pushed the number of TV sets sold in the London area to 9,000. These were small numbers, concentrated in a single city: at this stage television stayed an object for the few, while radio had already found its way into millions of homes.

Growth then stopped abruptly. By September 1, 1939, when the British service was suspended at the start of the Second World War, Britain is estimated to have had around 20,000 TV sets. That same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, Zworykin and RCA’s electronic system was unveiled to the public at the New York World’s Fair: just as British television went dark for the war, American television was only then reaching a wide audience.

Readers who want to follow how these technologies later merged with computing and networks can continue with the history of computers and the history of the internet, two inventions that would run on screens born from these same early experiments. The legal fight between Farnsworth and RCA is also a textbook case in intellectual property: winning a patent lawsuit is not, on its own, enough to guarantee commercial success, as would happen again decades later in the history of Apple and Steve Jobs.