Television

The first cathode ray tube dates back to 1927, but a primitive electromechanical system was invented in 1884 by a Russian (Paul Nipkow). In 1929, Alessandro Banfi and Sergio Bertolotti had transmitted the figure of a cloth doll at a distance in the Uri (Italian Radiophonic Union) studios in Milan. To film it they used a perforated disk that rotated quickly: the light passing through the holes described the object in the form of a series of light impulses. A battery of photocells had transformed the whole into electrical impulses, ready to be sent by cable.  The image, as big as a couple of stamps, was later reconstructed with another disc equipped with a neon tube. The electromechanical television system used by the two Italian engineers is the result of Paul Nipkow's research. Already in 1884, Nipkow invented the rotating disc system! (which would later bear his name), which was later developed by the Scotsman. John Logie Baird, Thanks to the latter and his Radiovision equipment, in 1927 the BBC produced the first television station. But the story of the birth of modern television speaks Russian. Born in Murom, 300 kilometres east of Moscow, the physicist Vladimir Kosma Zworykin is the father of television as we know it today. The meeting with Boris Itosing, his professor at the Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg, who has been using a primitive cathode ray tube as a receiving device since 1907, was fundamental. Forced to emigrate for political reasons, Zworykin arrived in the United States in 1919. And it was in a research laboratory in Pittsburgh that the prototype of electronic television was born: the iconoscope and the cathode ray tube, ancestors of television cameras and TV screens. The iconoscope was a cathode ray tube (which "shot" electrons), modified to explore the object to be transmitted. A series of photocells converted it all into current sent through the cable. On the other side, there was the cathode ray tube, what today we would call a screen. Here the electrical impulses become images, hitting photosensitive elements that can illuminate themselves for long enough to transmit a complete frame. Thus, the human eye sees a whole image and not a succession of light spots. Zworykin's research alternated with the brilliant discoveries of Phil Taylor Karnsworth, who had designed an electronic television system.

In 1926, not yet twenty, he founded a company to develop his ideas, which led to a first patent and public demonstration of television in 1934. Two years later, he was able to broadcast to about fifty television sets in Philadelphia. In the meantime, Zworykin, who moved to Rea, presented television to the public in 1939. It was 30 April 1939, a few months later Hitler invaded Poland and in Europe, it was the beginning of the Second World War. But an epochal event was about to take place. Among great ceremonies, the Universal Exhibition of New York opened. The great American corporations aimed to amaze the world with something extraordinary. Some presented Elektro, a sort of robot attached to the power socket that could do many funny things, even smoke a cigarette; General Motors, queen of cars, presented an animation of the motorways of the future, with rivers of cars that, controlled from a distance, ran fast along with the great spaces of the American continent; even further on, there was Rotolactor, a bizarre valve device able to wash, dry and milk 150 cows. Half a million people were there that day at the inauguration of the great Fair. Some with their mouths open, others a little perplexed. RCA, the company that owned the radio chain NBC, had chosen the 1939 Fair to present the last wonder of wonders, a "thing" called TV. A primordial camera, mounted on a structure as bulky as a crane, had been installed on a platform just under 20 metres from the speaker stage.

At 12.30 p.m. it was lit to frame the mayor of New York, the mythical Fiorello La Guardia, who, very curious, had come down from the stage to approach that strange banger. Immediately afterwards, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was framed as he delivered his inauguration speech. There were only 200 televisions on that day in the New York metropolitan area, most of them owned by NBC executives or eccentric billionaires, but there were also several monitors in the large atrium of the RCA headquarters in Manhattan, in some department store windows and the exhibition stands reserved for companies. All those who saw the first shots of La Guardia and Roosevelt were impressed by the sharpness of the images. From that day on, regular broadcasts began in many countries.

In Italy, in the same year the "radiovision service" began from Rome Monte Mario and at the Milan Radio Show. It will be the war that will delay the success of TV, which is why many believe that it was only born in the 1950s.