Welcome to: "Television History - The
First 75 Years"
The entire website is devoted to the
history of the design, development, and marketing of the
television set. It is arranged in a chronological order,
year-by-year, so you can see how things progressed. The
timeline button bars on the Home Page will take you to
hundreds of illustrations, graphics, reference articles,
advertising, photos and scans of real TV sets of long ago,
from the US, Europe and Japan.
Don't have time to surf, and want a
QUICK history overview? Let me give you the 5 minute tour
!!!
This website does not have a lot
of fancy animated graphics or interactive bells and
whistles. What it does have is the true and
compelling story of the forgotten genius who
invented electronic video. It may not be a fancy
website, but it sure is a good story.
please start by reading the
INTRODUCTION
and then proceed with the rest of
the story:
Beale:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows
things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of
work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a
nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a
gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the
street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know
what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the
air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat.
And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster
tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and
sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's
supposed to be!
We all know
things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like
everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out
any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world
we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is,
"Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.
Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted
radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not
going to leave you alone.
I want you to
get mad!
I don't want
you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want
you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't
know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do
about the depression and the inflation and the Russians
and the crime in the street.
All I know is
that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta
say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want
you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of
your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to
the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take this
anymore!!"
The History of
Film & Television
