Television: The Life Story of a Technology (review)

In the introduction, the author promises “a short history of television, a technological system that perhaps more people on the planet have engaged than any other, besides electrification, over the past 50 years.” Seen as a work that emphasizes the technical development of television and does so in a concise and engaging way, the author very much delivers on his promise.

In 181 well-crafted pages, Alexander Magoun takes us on a fascinating journey from the earliest experiments with photosensitive materials and the crude, halting efforts to transmit an image across space to the twenty-first-century creation and implementation of digital high-definition television. Drawing on the existing literature and adding materials available to him in his capacity as Executive Director of the David Sarnoff Library, Magoun summarizes in six chapters the history of TV technology from its conceptual roots in the late 1800s to 2006.

The first four chapters describe the evolution of the technology up to its national deployment in the 1950s. While the idea of seeing at a distance has ancient roots, the ability to transmit moving images begins with an accident, as telegraph engineers discover the photo sensitivity of selenium and begin to investigate the practical applications of the phenomenon. Chapter 1 describes the “Conception” of TV and Chapters 2 (“Birth of a Technology”) and 3 (“Parenthood”) trace the critical engineering contributions of TV pioneers, such as Scottish inventor John Logie Baird and his American counterpart, Charles Jenkins, who helped develop a mechanical form of television that used a spinning disc to recreate the moving image.

Key to the history of television engineering was the struggle between the independent inventor from Utah, Philo Farnsworth, and the corporate giant Radio Corporation of America (RCA), headed by David Sarnoff. Farnsworth and RCA’s chief television scientist, the Russian émigré Vladimir Zworykin, each created an all-electronic system for television, the foundation of modern analog TV technology. The technical, legal, and sometimes personal battle between Farnsworth and RCA is recounted in other works, such as David Fisher and Marshall Fisher’s Tube (1996), which typically cast Sarnoff as the driven executive seeking to buy out or suppress Farnsworth in a quest to control TV technology and the television industry. Television, perhaps unsurprisingly, portrays Sarnoff in a much kinder light, arguing Sarnoff’s desire to advance TV technology through standardization and with the resources that only a large corporation such as RCA could muster. This, in fact, is a recurring theme. RCA is credited as the mainspring of television development through the 1950s. In Chapter 4 (“Working for a Living”), Magoun describes RCA’s effort to commercialize television. Those who would impede or control the corporation, such as the members of the Federal Communications Commission, are often characterized as possessing neither the technical expertise nor the grand vision to appreciate Sarnoff’s work. Some business rivals are, unlike Sarnoff, colored as self-serving opportunists.

Chapter 5 covers the period from 1947 to 1987. It leaves the linear flow of the previous chapters to offer more discrete entries on “The Children of the Revolution,” which include cable and satellite television, improvements in TV camera engineering, and evolving display technologies.

The entries vary in length and detail. The history of cable television is summarized in two pages. Alternatively, the development of videotape, from its conception to its early applications in the broadcast industry to its miniaturization for home use and the subsequent format wars between the Betamax and VHS systems, provides greater detail.

The final chapter, “The Digital Generation and the End of Television,” takes us through the birth of high-definition television, beginning with efforts by the Japanese to create a high-resolution picture using existing analog techniques in the late 1960s and early 1970s and moving into the harnessing of digital technology in the late 1980s and the subsequent adoption of the digital television standards...