__________________________

__________________________

On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re adding up all the pieces needed to get to that date.
__________________________

Today’s installment covers two very different technologies needed to achieve real television.  The first is another step toward the electronic picture; the other redefines how those pictures will be sent and received.

Cathode Rays

In the annals of invention, some years stand out more for the ideas they set in motion than for practical gadgetry they actually delivered. In the annals of television invention, such a year was 1897.

First, in Strasbourg, the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun devised a new kind of glass tube that made the invisible visible. Taking the Crookes tube one step farther, Braun added a fluorescent screen and electrically charged metal plates that could bend the cathode rays. By January 1897 he had demonstrated an “oscillograph” in which the beam could trace patterns on the screen, a primitive ancestor of the oscilloscopes and television picture tubes to come. Braun’s device offered, for the first time, a controllable beam of electrons in a glass bulb.

Meanwhile, in Cambridge, Sir Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson – the Director of the University of  Cambridge University’s esteemed Cavendish Laboratory – was trying to find an explanation for the phenomenon that Braun, Crookes, and their predecessors observed in their tubes.  

In the spring of 1897 – just a few months after Braun demonstrated his first cathode ray tubes – Thomson stood before audiences in London and declared that those cathode rays were not caused by some mysterious fluid, as many still believed, but by streams of negatively charged particles. 

At first, Thomson called those particles “corpuscles” (Latin for “little bodies”), wanting to steer clear of another word that had been coined by the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney. In 1891, Stoney used the word “electron” to describe – in theory only – the fundamental unit of electric charge. Six years later, Thomson identified the actual subatomic particle that carried that charge.  

Within a few years, the scientific community began favoring Stoney’s term, and by 1904, “electron” was standard terminology in physics and industry. 

In 1906, Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases” – in simplified lay terms, for discovering the electron, a particle George Stoney had named in theory six years before Thomson’s discovery.

Look Ma, No Wires! – 1901

By the turn of the 20^th Century, science had found ways to send words, sounds, and even pictures over wires. 

But there can be no magic carpet of “pictures that fly through the air” unless you can get the pictures out of the wires.

The possibility of broadcasting was foretold in the 1860s, when Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a  unified theory.¹ 

Maxwell’s equations shaped not only the practical uses of electricity, but remain among the fundamentals of modern physics. And within Maxwell’s equations was the first suggestion that electromagnetic waves could ripple through space at the speed of light, circumventing the need for wires.

Maxwell’s equations remained theoretical until the 1880s, when the German physicist Heinrich Hertz conducted several practical experiments with Maxwell’s suggestions.

In his laboratory Karlsruhe, Hertz built an oscillator that generated high frequency sparks and a loop of wire that detected them across the room. The sparks on the detector leapt in time with those at the source, proving that Maxwell’s waves were a real, physical – if entirely invisible – phenomenon. When asked what use his discovery might have, Hertz shrugged: “Nothing, I guess.”^⁠2

But in Italy, Guglielmo Marconi thought otherwise. Where Maxwell had written only equations and Hertz had experimented only with sparks, Marconi saw the possibility of communication^⁠.3 

Working from his family’s estate in Bologna, Marconi’s first wireless set consisted of two components largely based on Hertz’s experiments from the 1880s. For a transmitter, he modified Hertz’s spark-gap generator to discharge high-voltage sparks. On the receiving end, he used a device called a “coherer” –  a glass tube filled with metal filings. When the filings were struck by the waves from the spark-gap generator, they clumped together enough to close an electrical circuit and ring a bell.  

That actually makes the first successful demonstration of “wireless” a crude form of remote control. 

But Marconi didn’t stop there. He tinkered endlessly with his aerials, stringing ever taller vertical wires. His big breakthrough came when he grounded those wires to the earth and discovered that Hertz’s sparks produced signals that could travel many miles.

The next step was to translate the experiment into a form of communication, which in those days meant adapting it to Morse code. 

In 1897, Marconi demonstrated his system to the British Post Office, sending dots and dashes across England’s Salisbury Plain.  Later that year he formed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, and over the next few years he extended the range of his system over ever wider distances.  

The Dawn of the Age of Wireless is most commonly dated to December 12, 1901, when Marconi claimed that he picked up the Morse code for the letter “S” (three dots) with a receiver in Newfoundland from a signal generated across the Atlantic in Cornwall, England. The feat was questioned by many at the time, but it captured the world’s imagination, made Marconi a household name, and provided the credibility he needed to grow his company on both sides of the Atlantic. 

There was still one more piece to add to the puzzle: actual sound.  

“Wireless” meant only Morse code until the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden began experimenting with the idea that radio waves might carry the full spectrum of sound. In December 1900, on a site in Maryland, he conducted what is often cited as the first transmission of human speech by wireless, using a crude microphone to modulate a high-frequency spark transmitter. The words were faint and distorted, but it proved that wireless could be more than scratchy bursts of dots and dashes.

Fessenden adapted his approach to continuous waves with transmitter he developed with Ernst Alexanderson, an engineer at General Electric.  On Christmas Eve 1906, transmitting from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, he played a phonograph recording of Handel, performed O Holy Night on his own violin, and read a passage from the Gospel of Luke. When ships along the Atlantic coast accustomed to hearing only dots and dashes suddenly heard music and a human voice, another epic threshold was crossed in the evolution of human communications. 

Fessenden’s experiments were primitive, and Morse code continued to be the primary form of wireless communication for another two decades. During that time, Marconi’s companies grew to dominate the business, and by the eve of World War I, he was operating a global network of stations, licensing equipment to navies, shipping lines, and news agencies.

When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, the Federal government thought better of having such critical assets owned by foreign interests, and commandeered American Marconi’s holdings for military use. 

Enter Goliath

After the armistice in 1918, the Navy and the government persuaded the General Electric Co. to form a new company to take over the Marconi patents, and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919.  GE kept a controlling stake, but Westinghouse, AT&T, and the United Fruit Company soon took large stakes in RCA – setting the stage for the monolithic, corporate capitalism that would dominate broadcasting – and the advent of television – in the decades that followed. 

_____________________________________________

 

 

¹The term “broadcast” long predates radio and television. In English farming usage of the 18th and 19th centuries, to “broadcast” meant to sow seed by hand, scattering it widely across a field. The word was later adopted metaphorically for radio in the early 20th century, describing the wide dispersal of signals through the air.

² If “Hertz” sounds familiar, that is because despite his downplaying his discovery, his name was adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1933 to replace “cycles per second” and became part of the International System of Units  in 1960.  So when we speak of radio frequencies now, we speak  of “kilohertz” and “megahertz.”

³ Like nearly everything else in the annals of invention (and especially when it comes to television/video), controversy swirls around the origins of wireless/radio. While Marconi is generally credited with making radio practical, others were experimenting along parallel lines. Nikola Tesla conducted wireless transmission tests in the 1890s and later contested Marconi’s patents; Alexander Popov in Russia demonstrated early receivers around the same time; and Jagadish Chandra Bose in India explored short-wave experiments that anticipated later techniques. For the sake of clarity, we follow Marconi’s storyline, while acknowledging the broader cast of pioneers.