History of the Term "Televison"

For this assignment, I decided to do a search on the word television. Although it is not a revolutionary idea as it was 30 years ago, and we now take it for granted, it was not always an easy idea. My first article that I came across was in the New York Times, and it was about how pictures were being transferred over telegraph. The article hinted at the possibilities of being able to transfer "views" over telegraph, which we would now call videos. Upon searching the Chicago Tribune, I came across a brief article titled Television Solved By A German. The article went in-depth to describe this complicated system that was considered a model for televison, and it was simply, once again, just an access to viewing images. The Los Angeles Times article was very similar to the Chicago Tribune one, except this time a similar television-like technology was developed by a group of French scientists, although they do acknowledge the work of the German scientist.

While searching the scholarly article databases, I had different results than from searching newspapers. First off, many of the articles were not available to look at online (which was frustrating to me in doing this assignment). I could not find specific articles that included the first mention of television, but while browsing through, it was clear that in many of the articles, the television had become more commonplace, however it was viewed in more of a "revolutionary" light and it was being praised for what it offered.

Today, when we hear television, we all think of the device we had in our homes. We think of our DVR recordings we have. We think of the shows that we have to catch up on on Netflix. It is a part of many people's daily lives, and something that most of us do not think very in-depth to. While doing this research, I can see that it was not always common. It changed from a new invention that needed plenty of tweaking, to a revolutionary device that provided a new service that was available to the public, to something that is part of all our daily lives and is not something we need to think twice about.