February 22, 2008
In 1937, an American physicist, Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-71), invented the electronic television.
The first public display of television in the United States was on April 30, 1939, at the opening of the New York World’s Fair. The National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) announced that it was ready to broadcast programs for two hours each week. CBS also began broadcasting in 1939, and, by the middle of the next year, there were twenty-three TV stations in the US.
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Updated February 22, 2008
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July 22, 1962 was when the first intercontinental television broadcast took place. It was from America to Europe using the Telstar satellite.
December 17, 1953, RCA designed the first successful color television system. An episode of Dragnet was the first program broadcast in color.
According to the A.C. Nielsen Company, 95 percent of the U.S. population watches some amount of television every day. The A.C. Nielsen Company also reports that the average American home has a television on for nearly eight hours a day. The average American adult watches nearly five hours of television per day. The average child between the age of two and five watches about three and one half hours per day. And the average adult over 55 watches for almost six hours a day
Just how much time is wasted watching TV? You can do the math: the average adult watches TV 5 hours a day. That is 35 hours a week, nearly as much time as spent working a 40-hour work-week. Just what would we be doing if the TV was out of the house? Would we read more books? Would our houses be spotless inside? Would we work on our vehicles, and learn how these high-tech things work? I am quite sure the average American would be in better physical condition--more time spent walking the neighborhood, more family time spent together. Perhaps half of marriages would not end in divorce.
Thanks Farnsworth. The lazy, non-constructive American thanks you for our pastime of wasting our lives away on the couch.
But then again, he already knew what he had invented. He ensured there were no televisions in his house. He admitted, "I created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives."
I do believe Ray Bradbury said it best, "Television: that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little"
