It has been called the idiot box and the boob tube, but the fact is that perhaps no invention was as important to the later half of the 20th century as the television.

Once the problems of moving pictures and wireless audio had been solved, it took quite a bit longer to solve the problem of wireless moving pictures.

But once it was solved, it revolutionized the world.

Learn more about the history of television, how it was developed and how it took over the world

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The development of a working television that could receive moving images via

electromagnetic waves and then display them on an electronic device took

many different innovations before they could all be packaged together in a working product.

The first steps which led to the development of a television go back far earlier than most people realize.

It all started with the ability to send a facsimile of an image over a telegraph line.

A system for sending an image via telegraph was developed shockingly early after the telegraph itself.

The first patent for transmitting an image over a telegraph line was

filed in 1843 by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. The quality of the image was extremely

poor and it was incredibly slow and it really wasn't practical.

In 1884, a German student by the name of Paul Gottlieb Nipkow invented a device known as a

Nipkow disc.

The Nipkow disc was an extremely important device that allowed images to be scanned.

The disc was just a circular disc with holes in it in a spiral pattern.

As the disc was spun, light would pass through the holes which could take a slice of the image which could then be sent to a light detector.

If you remember back to my episode on Solar Power, it was discovered in the 19th century that the element selenium was

discovered to be photo-conductive. Not only was this really important in the

development of photoelectric cells, but also in light receptors which became used in what was then known as mechanical television.

The word television was first coined in 1900 by a paper by the Russian

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