A Fond Farewell to Analog Television

A Fond Farewell to Analog Television
Bettmann / CORBIS

Breakthrough
The first machines rendered crude images, for they relied on a mechanical system of scanning the origin image, sorely limiting their capabilities and potential. In 1927, a young American named Philo Taylor Farnsworth developed a commercially successful way to use a cathode-ray tube — the glass object in the photo above, projecting an image of Joan Crawford — to generate an electrical television signal.

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