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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.

That date will mark the 100th Anniversary of the day that electronic video made its first appearance on Earth in Philo T. Farnsworth’s laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.

Before we can start the Countdown – and make the case that Philo T. Farnsworth invented television – we need to look back on the discoveries, speculations, false starts, and breakthroughs that finally came to fruition at 202 Green Street in San Francisco on September 7th, 1927.

As is so often the case, the path to the right idea was littered with curious detours. Some experiments genuinely added to our knowledge of light and electricity. And in hindsight, some seem almost comical, like those wobbly contraptions you see in old newsreels of men trying to fly before the Wright Brothers finally took off  at Kitty Hawk.

We’ll get to the TeeVee equivalents in due time…

By the time Farnsworth’s tubes hummed to life in 1927, he was building on a century’s worth of discovery and experimentation. His success was not a lucky accident. It was the culmination of decades of inquiry across a wide range of pursuits.

Still, his  contribution was the key that unlocked the future – the turning point between all that came before and everything that would follow.

The dream of “seeing at a distance” stretches back to antiquity. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wondered why a swinging torch appears not as a point of flame but as a continuous ring of fire. In that question lay the earliest recognition  that the human eye retains an image beyond the instant when it is imprinted. 

During Aristotle’s era, other dreamers imagined the the all-seeing Gods of Olympus, and wondered how men, too, might achieve such power. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke of visions from afar. In myths, mirrors, and crystal balls, the desire to witness distant events has been as enduring as the afterimage in the human eye that Aristotle first observed.  

So let’s start there. 

1824: Persistence of Vision 

Motion pictures and television would not exist if our eyes didn’t play tricks on us.  But it was not until the early 19^th century that science began to get a handle on the phenomenon that Aristotle had pondered two millennia earlier.  

On December 9, 1824, the British scientist Peter Mark Roget presented a paper to London’s Royal Society entitled An Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel When Seen Through Vertical Apertures.^⁠1 He showed how the spokes of a wheel, glimpsed through slits, seemed to curve because successive images remain briefly in the eye.  His conclusion – that each image lingers on the retina just long enough to create the illusion of motion – laid the theoretical foundation for both cinema and video. 

1832-1878:  Optical Illusions

Roget’s dissertation opened the door to a parade of optical toys and mechanical marvels. 

In 1832, the Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau turned still images into a kind of animation, in a contraption that he called the “Phenakistoscope” (from the Greek for “deceptive viewer”).  Plateau’s invention used a spinning disc with slits around the edge and sequential drawings on the surface that – when held before a mirror –  became the first device to employ persistence of vision to create the visual illusion of motion.²

The following year, the Austrian physicist Simon von Stampfer introduced a similar device he called the “Stroboscopische Scheiben” — literally German for “stroboscopic discs.”^⁠3 Unlike Plateau’s version, Stampfer emphasized the stroboscopic principle – the periodic interruption of light that tricks the eye into seeing movement.

In 1834, the British mathematician William George Horner introduced the Zoetrope^⁠4, a cylindrical drum with a sequence of drawings placed around the inner surface and a series of vertical slits cut into the sides of the drum. When the drum was spun, the viewer looked through the slits and the drawings came to life – a galloping horse, a dancing figure, a flying bird. The Zoetrope’s spinning drum-and-slits introduced an intermittent “shutter” effect: imprinting an image in the eye, then going dark until the next image appeared – intruding the principle that made motion pictures possible in later decades.^⁠5

Here’s an excellent video demonstrating the Zoetrope.

These parlor toys delighted Victorian audiences, but it took the addition of another new art form to reveal their ultimate promise.

Flying Horses

Photography first entered the picture (pun intended) on June 19, 1878.  That’s when California governor and railroad magnate Leland Stanford commissioned English photographer Eadweard  Muybridge to settle a wager over the question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves leave the soil momentarily when at a full gallop^⁠6. 

To resolve the debate, Muybridge arranged two dozen cameras in the ring at Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. The cameras were triggered by tripwires when Stanford’s prize mare ‘Sallie Gardner’ hit the wires with her thundering hooves. When the film was processed, it revealed that the horse did, indeed, come momentarily completely airborne.

Leland Stanford’s flying mare ‘Sallie Gardner’ in what is widely regarded as the first motion picture, ca. 1878.

Stanford won his wager, and Muybridge’s images of the flying mare were the first time motion was recorded in discrete frames and reassembled into perceived motion.

Muybridge’s work was built on that of Plateau, Stampfer, and Horner, and his work inspired cinema pioneers like Thomas Edison in the U.S. and Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, and the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in France.

The frame-by-frame manipulation of persistence of vision is the vital idea within all frame-based visual media. And it all derives from the phenomenon that Aristotle first observed in a swirling torch. 

1888–1894:  Celluloid Dreams

By the 1880s, Victorian parlor tricks like the Zoetrope evolved into the far more ambitious spectacle of cinema.

Some trace the beginnings of motion pictures to the French artist and inventor Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince.  On October 14, 1888, while visiting Leeds, England, Le Prince exposed several seconds of his in-laws walking through garden their onto a chemically treated paper strip.  Film historians cite those few seconds of “film” as the earliest surviving motion picture. 

Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene is first moving picture ever made using film and a camera.

 In 1891, the famous American inventor Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, which allowed one-person-at-a-time to view a tiny “movie” through a peephole. 

And in France, the brothers Lumière –  Auguste and Louis – perfected the cinématographe – a camera and projector whose name gave us the word “cinema.” In 1895 the Lumières began public screenings in Paris, launching the age of projected film.

Edison’s Kinetoscope

At their core, these inventions were the 19th century extension of Aristotles original observation:  that a rapid succession of still images could fool the eye into perceiving motion.

In the 1890s, celluloid replaced paper. Shutters and sprockets became more reliable, and films that once flickered for mere seconds ran long enough to tell stories. 

In 1894 another American, Charles Francis Jenkins, invented an improved motion picture projector he called the Phantoscope, which he sold to Edison, who rebranded it as the Vitascope. Jenkins made several other contributions to film tech, but by the turn of the century began to entertain an even bolder idea, something he would eventually come to call “radiovision”  – an early stab at broadcasting moving images.

Moe Rocca takes us through the career of C. Francis Jenkins

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^⁠1 If the name “Roget” sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’re old enough to remember Roget’s Thesaurus.  That was how we found words in ancient times –  before you just clicked and all the options popped up in a little window. 

^⁠2 Unfortunately for Joseph Plateau, his relentless pursuit of optical phenomena made him blind from staring into the sun.

³ In English, “Stroboscopische Scheiben” was quickly shortened to Stroboscope, the term still used today for devices that freeze motion with flashing lights.

⁴ Horner originally called his invention the  “Daedaleum” – after the mythic craftsman Daedalus. The name Zoetrope was adopted in the 1860s, when America toy makers reintroduced it to a wider audience.

⁵ And if the word “Zoetrope” seems vaguely familiar, that might be because renowned American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola named his production company “American Zoetrope.”

⁶ And if the name “Stanford” sounds familiar, that’s because Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, founded Stanford University in 1885, naming it after their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid at age 15.