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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.

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Before this meandering journey through the history of science and technology can reach its desired destination – the actual inventing of television – physics will have to quite literally make a quantum leap. 

Michael Faraday’s experiments with electrical induction in the 1830s, followed by James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, gave science its first comprehensive grasp of electromagnetism. That understanding spawned telegraphy, electric lighting, sound recording, motion pictures and wireless – the array of gadgets that made television imaginable.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the study of electricity had not only transformed daily life, it was also starting to alter our fundamental understanding of the universe that we live in.  

Each step along the path of that new understanding was built on prior discoveries.

Faraday and Maxwell

When Faraday showed that electricity could produce magnetism and vice-versa, he was building on the work of  Hans Christian Ørsted, who observed the  in the 1820s that an electric current could deflect a compass needle. That meant that electricity produced magnetism. 

Faraday engineered the inverse of Ørsted’s nugget, using magnets to  produce electricity – which laid the groundwork for practical electric generators and motors.

In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell distilled Faraday’s insights into a set of equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single electromagnetic theory.  

By determining that light was another kind of electromagnetic wave, Maxwell’s work was a triumph of classical physics, but it also opened the lid on an even deeper well of mysteries. 

The news that light is an electromagnetic wave opened the floodgates for the kinds of questions only scientists can ask:  If light is a wave, why do heated objects change color as they get hotter, instead of simply shining more brightly?  Why do heated gases give off only a few bright colors of light instead of a smooth rainbow of light?

It’s a Quantum Thing

In 1900, the German physicist Max Planck offered an answer to such questions that quickly opened the door on a whole new field of inquiry. Planck suggested that energy is conveyed in discrete “packets” that he called “quanta,” rather than in a smooth, continuous flow like a wave. With this hypothesis, Planck fixed the first cornerstone in a new field of physics called “quantum mechanics” – the study of matter and energy at the subatomic level. 

Meanwhile, another German physicist, Phillipp Lenard, was experimenting with Braun’s cathode ray tubes.  In 1902, Lenard performed detailed experiments on Hertz’s 1887 observation that electrons are released when light is shined on certain metal surfaces – the effect that enabled the photocells in the first mechanical attempts at television.  Lenard measured how the number and energy of electrons depended on the intensity of the light. He confirmed that higher-frequency light knocked out higher-energy electrons – but he couldn’t explain why.

For his discoveries with cathode rays, Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905. But that acclaim was lost in the clamor later that year when yet another German physicist published a paper that offered a solution to the questions that even Lenard still could not answer. 

His name was Albert Einstein. 

1905 – The Annus Mirabilis

The year that Lenard won his Nobel is better remembered as Einstein’s  “Annus Mirabilis” – the “miracle year” when he published not one, not two, but four different papers that rewrote physics for the 20^th century. 

A century later, Einstein is most remembered for the paper that introduced the elastic “spacetime continuum” of Special Relativity, and the most famous mathematical formula of all time, E=mc².  

But Einstein’s first 1905 paper set the stage for a revolution in physics when he articulated and quantified the “photoelectric effect” that was already being utilized in countless experiments without being fully understood.  

Einstein’s breakthrough explained that light behaves not only as a wave but also as a stream of particles, which — borrowing from Planck — he called ‘light quanta,’ later known as “photons.”^⁠1

Of course, Einstein’s hypothesis was greeted as heresy by the orthodox scientific community that continued to profess – per Maxwell – that light could only be an electromagnetic wave.  

An American physicist at the California Institute Of Technology (Caltech), Robert A. Millikan, even spent a full decade trying to disprove Einstein’s ‘light quanta’ hypothesis.  Millikan finally had to accept that the data confirmed Einstein’s radical idea and resolved the puzzles that Lenard and others had struggled to explain.  

In 1921 Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize – not for Relativity or E=mc², but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect^⁠2. 

Einstein’s Nobel was timely recognition.  With the addition of his clear articulation of the phenomenon by which light becomes electricity, all the essential pieces of the puzzle that had to be solved for television to go fully electronic were on the table. 

All that was needed was somebody who could put them together. 

And in the summer of 1921, that somebody was tilling a field near Rigby, Idaho.

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¹ In his first groundbreaking 1905 paper (entitled: On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light): Einstein referred to “energy quanta” and to light consisting of “independent energy quanta localized at points in space.”  

Gilbert N. Lewis introduced the word “photon” in a paper entitled  The Conservation of Photon published in the journal  Nature in 1926. He meant it as a convenient term for a unit of radiant energy, though the physics community quickly adopted it as the particle name for Einstein’s light quanta.

² It should be stressed that Einstein had not discovered the photoelectric effect. That distinction belongs to Hertz and Lenard.  Einstein’s Nobel-worthy contribution was quantifying  the law that governs it, which became the cornerstone of quantum mechanics.