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Television


by Chris Woodford. Last updated: January 12, 2022.

T elevision is an amazing window on the world. At the flick of a button,

you can travel from the North Pole to the Serengeti, watch men walking on the
Moon, see athletes breaking records, or listen to world leaders making historic
speeches. Television has transformed entertainment and education; in the
United States, it's been estimated that children spend more time watching TV
(on average 1023 hours a year) than they do sitting in school (900 hours a
year). Many people feel this is a bad thing. One of TV's inventors, Philo T
Farnsworth (1906–1971), came to the conclusion that television was
hopelessly dumbed down and refused to let his children watch it. Whether TV
is good or bad, there's no doubting that it's an ingenious invention. But how
exactly does it work? Let's take a closer look!
Photo: Virtually everyone has flatscreen TVs these days, which make their pictures using LCDs, plasma,
or OLEDs (organic LEDs). But until the 1990s, TVs were much bigger and bulkier and virtually all of them
were using cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology, as explained below.

Contents

1. Radio—with pictures
2. TV cameras
3. TV transmitters
4. TV receivers
5. Cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions
6. How a cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV works
7. Flatscreen televisions
8. A brief history of television
9. Find out more
Radio—with pictures
The basic idea of television is "radio with pictures." In other words,
where radio transmits a sound signal (the information being broadcast)
through the air, television sends a picture signal as well. You probably know
that these signals are carried by radio waves, invisible patterns
of electricity and magnetism that race through the air at the speed of light
(300,000 km or 186,000 miles per second). Think of the radio waves carrying
information like the waves on the sea carrying surfers: the waves themselves
aren't the information: the information surfs on top of the waves.

Photo: As radios became more portable, people started to realize tiny TVs could be too. This early
example is an  Ekco TMB272 from about 1955, which could be powered either by the usual domestic
electricity supply or a 12-volt battery. Although sold as a portable, it was extremely heavy; even so, it
found quite a niche market with TV companies such as the BBC, who used it as a monitor for outside
broadcasts.

Television is really a three-part invention: the TV camera that turns a picture

and sound into a signal; the TV transmitter that sends the signal through the
air; and the TV receiver (the TV set in your home) that captures the signal and
turns it back into picture and sound. TV creates moving pictures by repeatedly
capturing still pictures and presenting these frames to your eyes so quickly
that they seem to be moving. Think of TV as an electronic flick-book. The
images are flickering on the screen so fast that they fuse together in your
brain to make a moving picture (really, though they're really lots of still pictures
displayed one after another).

When TV was first developed, all it could handle was black-and-white

pictures; engineers struggled to figure out how to cope with color as well,
which was a much more complex problem. Now the science of light tells us
that any color can be made by combining a mixture of the three primary
colors, red, green, and blue. So the secret of making color TV was to develop
cameras that could capture separate red, green, and blue signals,
transmission systems that could beam color signals through the air, and TV
sets that could turn them back into a moving, multicolored image.

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TV cameras
We can see things because they reflect light into our eyes. An ordinary "still"
camera photographs things by capturing this light on light-sensitive film or
using electronic light-detector (in the case of a digital camera) to make a
snapshot of how something appeared at a particular moment. A TV camera
works in a different way: it has to capture a new snapshot over 24 times per
second to create the illusion of a moving picture.

What's the best way for a TV camera to capture a picture? If you've ever tried
copying a masterpiece from the wall of an art gallery into a notebook, you'll
know there are lots of ways to do it. One way is to draw a grid of squares in
your notebook, then copy the details systematically from each area of the
original picture into the corresponding square of the grid. You could work from
left to right and from top to bottom, copying each grid square in turn.

An old-fashioned TV camera works exactly like this when it turns a picture into
a signal for broadcasting, only it copies the picture it sees a line at a time.
Light-detectors inside the camera scan across the picture line by line, just like
your eyes scanning from top to bottom of the picture in an art gallery. This
process, which is called raster scanning, turns the picture into 525 different
"lines of colored light" (in a common TV system called NTSC, or 625 lines in a
rival system known as PAL) that are beamed through the air to your home as
a video (picture) signal. At the same time, microphones in the TV studio
capture the sound that goes with the picture. This is transmitted alongside the
picture information as a separate audio (sound) signal.
Photo: A typical video/TV camera. The camera operator stands at the back watching a small TV screen
that shows exactly what the camera is filming. Note that the cameraman isn't looking through the camera
lens: he's seeing a recreation of what the lens is viewing on a screen (a bit like looking at the display on a
digital camera). Photo by Justin R. Blake courtesy of US Navy and Wikimedia Commons.

Modern TV cameras don't "scan" pictures this way anymore. Instead, just as
in camcorders and webcams, their lenses focus the scene being filmed onto
small, image-sensing microchips (either CCD or CMOS sensors), which
convert the pattern of colors into digital, electrical signals. While traditional
scanning cameras used only 525 or 625 lines, the image sensing chips in
today's HDTV (high-definition television) cameras generally have either 720 or
1080 lines for capturing much more detail. Some cameras have a single
image sensor capturing all colors at once; others have three separate ones,
capturing separate red, blue, and green signals—the primary colors from
which any color on your TV can be made.
Artwork: TV cameras break pictures up into separate red, green, and blue signals. White light (made of all
colors) coming from the object being filmed passes through the lens (1) and enters a beam splitter (2).
This is usually a two-part,  trichroic prism  that divides the light into separate red, green, and blue beams,
each of which is detected by a separate CCD or CMOS image sensor. A circuit (3) mathematically
synchronizes and combines the outputs from the red, green, and blue image sensors to make a single
video signal based on components called luminance and chrominance (loosely, the brightness and color
of each part of the image). Another part of the circuit instantly recreates the image being filmed on a small
screen in a viewfinder (4). Meanwhile, sound from a microphone (not shown) is synchronized with the
video signal to produce an output signal ready for transmission (5).

TV transmitters
Photo: TV antennas don't have to look ugly: they can make a dramatic centerpiece to a building, as here,
at the KJRH TV studios, a prominent landmark in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photo: Courtesy of John Margolies
Roadside America photograph archive (1972–2008),  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division.

The louder you shout, the easier it is to hear someone at a distance. Louder
noises make bigger sound waves that have the power to travel further before
they get soaked up by bushes, trees, and all the clutter around us. The same
is true of radio waves. To make radio waves that are strong enough to carry
radio and TV pictures many miles from a TV station to someone's home, you
need a really powerful transmitter. This is effectively a giant antenna (aerial),
often positioned on top of a hill so it can send signals as far as possible.

Not everyone receives TV signals transmitted through the air in this way. If
you have cable television, your TV pictures are "piped" into your home down
a fiber-optic