Home Entertainment: 100 Years of TV


An Amazing Invention we all take for granted


Chatting to my lively good friend, Syd (he was 101 in January), about today’s technology during our regular weekly get together at our local, he simply says, “I think TV is an amazing invention we all take for granted these days. It’s great to see and appreciate other cultures around the world”.


W


ell, he has a valid point. Even before colour television, watching in black


& white, the nature programmes from the Rain Forests in South America or the Temples across the Asian continent, there was an appreciation of wonder at that time. Then came along the real appreciation of


television as colour sets were a ‘must’ to own influenced greatly to watch the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation, in the home on 2 June 1953. Having a large ‘box’, adorned with ornaments on top, dominating a corner of the living room, wasn’t a real issue then as it was a somewhat status symbol of the times. Today, we now have super slim screens, some


fixed-on walls - 50-inch, 65-inch and even larger, up to 118-inch, 4K UHD (Ultra High Definition) offering, at the moment, the ultimate of picture quality. That said, 8K TV is the highest resolution though owing to the current lack of programme media to fully benefit having such a set which has four times more pixels than a 4K set, it is an expense probably best left at the moment. So, where and when did all this start? Television successfully came into being on


Friday the 2nd of October 1925 at a small lab in 22 Frith Street, London, where John Logie Baird focused his work. It had a long gestation period, with significant developments going back into the 1870s.


The first public presentation happened in January 1926 30 | www.ierdaily.co.uk What began as a fuzzy, experimental


technology has evolved into something that has fundamentally reshaped our way of living, hunger for differing entertainment, and our sharing of global information. The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) was the device


to set the ball rolling for future decades in TV development. Amazingly, the earliest version of the CRT was invented by the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897 and is also known as the Braun tube. Braun was the first to conceive the use of a CRT as a display device. With a phosphor-coated screen, the Braun tube became the foundation of 20th century television.


On 2nd November 1936, the BBC first


broadcast from Alexandra Palace, London. Not wishing to show my age, I have childhood memories of my parents renting their first Black & White TV from Rediffusion, I also have vague memories prior, of watching a neighbour’s 10-inch B&W TV with a magnifying glass fixed to the front. I guess it was from those days, the world of sound and vision fascinated me, steering my future career into both hi-fi and TV.


By the 1950s, as mentioned earlier, TV became a cultural phenomenon with Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation drawing 20 million viewers in the UK alone. The subsequent decades saw colour broadcasts, commercial television networks with ITV launching 22


PEOPLE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE


September 1955, thus the foundations of advertising products and businesses reshaping the UK marketplace. As the early 60s progressed, with costs of


sets relatively high, rental of TVs became the normal acquisition for all households. Rental was booming and both independent and national retailers were abundant to provide a turnkey service, bearing in mind, service was a demanding issue in those early days as reliability was not great for both Black & White and CTV (Colour Television). Late 60s and 70s, with the rapid growth of


CTV, reliability was an issue for both the full valve and hybrid models. Service was even more in demand as the red, green and blue convergence proved to be an issue and valve replacements were a regular occurrence. This was until the fully transistor sets were


Spring 2026


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