Television Repair

The television was invented in the early 20th century as a novel way to transmit moving pictures through radio waves. Early television sets actually used mechanical means to etch out a picture from a signal using a Nipkow Disk, with the first demonstration taking place in Paris in 1909. This early “television” technology was capable of transmitting an 8x8 pixel image, with the first demonstration showing individual letters of the alphabet, and clearly!

In 1911, Rosing and Zworykin invented a method of passing an image over a mechanical mirror drum to transmit the image via wire to a “Braun tube,” now known as the Cathode Ray Tube, or CRT. Then in 1921, Eduoard Belin transmitted the first image over radio waves using his belinograph. The early 1920s saw the birth of the first true televisions, adding amplification to these two technologies to send moving images with some semblance of clarity over air and wire. By 1928, the Baird Television Company sent the first transatlantic broadcast from London to New York, starring his own ventriloquist puppets “James” and “Spooky Bill,” whose painted faces showed up in higher resolution due to their increased contrast.

Parallel to all this, advancement in the transmission of images through electrical means was happening in the scientific community, advancing early experiments in deflecting cathode rays by physicist J.J. Thompson and the invention of the “Braun tube” by Ferdinand Braun in 1897. By 1926, Hungarian engineer Kálmán Tihanyi had invented a television set which both scanned and displayed images using electrical means, with Professor Farnsworth’s image dissector transmitting the first electronic image the following year in 1927.

Eventually, the analog transmissions became surpassed in quality to digital transmissions, seeing more efficient use of bandwidth, bringing about the more modern televisions we see today. Now televisions use the latest in LCD and OLED technology, with new methods like progressive scanning and curved screens being used to produce images sometimes indistinguishable from reality. With these new technologies, the scope of the hardware used has changed in turn, with most televisions sporting similar processors to computers on motherboards dedicated to integrated smart technologies. While working on your old CRT may be ill-advised, this page should help if you’re in the need for some TV repair information.

• Wikipedia - Television