'Discuss the factors that shaped the invention and development of television in the UK up to 1939; which of these were the mos

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'Discuss the factors that shaped the invention and development of television in the U.K. up to 1939; which of these were the most important?'

In this essay I intend to discuss the factors that shaped the invention and development of television in the UK up to 1939; these include the social, cultural, political and scientific factors that took place as well as the many technological changes. I will then conclude by determining the most important aspects of its development.

Technological developments

The essence of the television began in the early nineteenth century with the development of the telephone and the telegraph. These communication devices can be seen as a more technical version to the way Native American Indians communicated via their smoke signal technique. The early telegraphs were large outdoor mechanical structures that proved to be very expensive to produce. During the 1840's there came a great discovery and this was of electromagnetism, electric current was found to be of great use within wiring. It was this discovery that inevitably led to the development of the 'electric telegraph'. The electric telegraph was a transmitter of messages and signals through electric wiring and was transmitted via connections throughout the world. One of its earliest forms of communication was with the use of Morse code and this was greatly used within the railway system; before this invention the railways found it difficult to co-ordinate the transport thus creating many accidents on the rail tracks.

The telegraph and the telephone were then developed further between 1842 and 1862 with the use of photography and this culmination became 'telephotography'. This became available with the use of the telephone lines. At each end of the communicative line was a system of metal 'forks' that rested over paper soaked in an iodine solution and when an electric current passed through these forks it would also flow onto the paper thus leaving marks according to their movement. With the transmission from both communication sources, images would start to appear on the paper making it able to instantly receive and transmit images. Telephotography is still in use today; or rather it has developed into what is now called a fax copy, which is short for facsimile. This alone is an important development in television technology because it enabled us, for the first time, to use electric currents to send and retrieve images and 'it could be said that the origins of television date back to the discovery of electricity by Volte and Galvani' (Sinclair, I, 1995). By 1875 Britain, France, Japan and Australia had been connected via transatlantic cables, using electric currents, thus making the countries of the world an operating integrated network.
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The technical aspects of the television involve the scanning of an image via beams of light in a series of lines. These lines of light make signals that are converted into electrical impulses. These are then amplified, transmitted and reconverted into the image shown on the television screen. Karl Braun invented this system with the use of a Cathode-Ray tube- "the word 'cathode' means positive and the word 'ray' was fashionable at the time" (Wyver, J; 1989); but its earlier design was quite different and had an alternative use in mind. In 1884, Paul Nipkow designed his idea ...

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