100 Years of Physics and Television

One hundred years ago today, on January 26, 1926, Scottish inventor and engineer John Logie Baird conducted the world’s first public demonstration of live television in London to members of the Royal Institution. (For Doctor Who fans, Baird’s name might seem familiar from the 2023 episode depicting his earlier experiments with “Stooky Bill” ventriloquist’s dolls, seen in the teaser photo above.)

The term “television ” was first coined in English in 1907 to refer to the then theoretical technology to transmit moving images across telegraph or telephone wires, borrowing from the French télévision. While television was the term that stuck, other early terms for the technology included televista, televiewer, and televisioner, with “TV” as the accepted acronym starting in the late 1940s.

In the 1920s, scientists and inventors across the world were experimenting with transmitting images, resulting in varying approaches to the technology. Early pioneers included Baird , Bell Telephone Laboratories , American inventor Philo Farnsworth , Russian-American physicist Vladimir Zworykin , and Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi . Some of the earliest working systems were mechanical in nature which had limited resolution, while electronic televisions made use of the cathode-ray tube (CRT), which allowed for the beaming of graphics using electrons. Later developments with fiber optic cables and liquid crystal displays (LCD) increased resolution and transmission speeds. While many are familiar with the use of television in the household for entertainment, it has also been useful as a tool for scientific discovery and communication.

For this edition of Photos of the Month, we are going to look at some of the ways the technology of television has been shaped by and helped shape the fields of physics and astronomy in the last century.

Early Television Models

Physicists were involved with the design of television from the very beginning, utilizing numerous technologies such as cathode ray tubes and fiber optics.

In April 1927, Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated their mechanical television system to the public for the first time. While not the first in the world, the Bell system was much more sophisticated and had higher resolution than any existing models. It not only transmitted images, but also synchronized them with sound and allowed for two-way communication.

The demonstration featured a live transmission of images accompanied by a speech from then-Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, from Washington, DC, to the AT&T offices in Whippany, New York, using an enhanced radio line. (See a news reel of it from the Herbert Hoover Preseidential Library & Museum ).

The research for this system was led by Dr. Herbert E. Ives and a team of over 50 Bell Labs engineers. The photo above shows the smaller of two New York television receivers used in the demonstration. At the back are Joseph Horton and Robert C. Mathes (seated), who developed the signal-transmitting portion of the system. Standing in the foreground is Hugh M. Stoller, who built the motors for synchronizing the transmitter and receiver. The Bell System used crystal-controlled frequency standards to keep the transmitter and receiver synchronized for both image and sound.

This image was originally published in a special issue of the Bell Laboratories Record in May 1927, which provides a more detailed account of the demonstration, the physics behind the receiver system, more photos, and the full text of Hoover’s speech.

A major step in the development of electronic television was the introduction of the cathode-ray tube. The first working televisions were mechanical, often using a spinning disk to scan an image onto a light sensor. The cathode ray tube (CRT), by contrast, converted images into electron beams transmitted over wire and reconstituted on a screen elsewhere, allowing for more efficient transmission.

In 1922, John Bertrand Johnson and Harry Weiner Weinhart developed the hot cathode, which later became a key component in televisions. Hot cathodes emit electrons at high power density and low voltage, covering significantly more surface area than cold cathodes, allowing for application to television technology. This photograph from Bell Labs is a model of a television receiver tube (i.e. the thing that converts television signals into images) that incorporates a hot cathode ray tube, based on a design developed by Johnson in 1935.

For more on the physics of cathode ray tubes, check out this digitized 1975 physics workbook from AIP’s Physics of Technology series.

In the late 1930s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) began working on a more efficient way of scanning and storing images for television using a low velocity scanning beam. Their Image Orthicon was a composite of earlier methods of image dissectors and soon became one of the most commonly used television cameras in the mid-20^th century.

The Image Orthicon was developed by physicists Albert Rose, Paul Weimer, and Harold Law for RCA, and was first used by the U.S. Navy in 1944 before being introduced for civilian use in 1946. The key advancement was its ability to pick up moving television pictures in much lower light levels than the previous technologies (which had sometimes been so bright that the heat of lamps had set things on fire). Its sensitivity was similar to the human eye, which allowed for filming in candlelight and moonlight – as the photo above demonstrates in a test run of the technology for the U.S. Navy in April 1944.

Since the Image Orthicon is extremely light sensitive, bright objects can oversaturate the image, giving them a distinctive dark halo. This halo is visible in early televised rocket launches in the 1960s.

By the mid-1960s, color television was on the scene and television programming was constantly expanding, increasing the need for more efficient and lightweight ways of transmitting signals across large distances. The Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in the UK pioneered a technique using fiber optic cables in 1966, seen above, which was capable of transmitting a 960-channel color television picture over several hundred meters on just a single glass fiber optic cable. Standard Telecommunication Laboratories was home to fiber optics development pioneer Charles K. Kao, later nicknamed the “father of fibre optics” when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. While it would be another 10 years before commercial fiber optic communication systems became commonplace, they were used to broadcast the 1976 Olympics and revolutionized telecommunications. They are still used for high speed bandwith for internet and television.

Television for Scientific Research

In addition to contributing to the development of television, physicists have also used television technology in their own research, from remotely monitoring dangerous areas to providing exposures for faint stellar phenomena.

Nuclear reactors can have highly radioactive areas, so keeping an eye on them is critical for safety. Here we see a television monitor being used in the control room at the Hanford atomic plant in Washington State to allow two engineers from General Electric to safely check on reactor equipment. Television monitors were built into the design of Hanford from the very beginning. As early as 1944, chemical separation building designs placed operators behind seven feet of concrete shielding in some places, and equipment was remotely controlled and manipulated through views provided by television monitors and periscopes.

Television has also had a long history in the field of astronomy. Television technology had the ability to intensify the brightness of faint images, as seen with the Image Orthicon earlier, meaning that it was possible to use it to generate a brighter image over a shorter exposure with less atmospheric distortion. Russian astronomer Dr. N. F. Kuprevich at the Pulkovo Observatory in Leningrad, seen above, pioneered the use of television techniques for ground telescopes. The first television telescope at Pulkovo Observatory was constructed in 1958 using a “Superorthicon” camera tube and successfully captured clear images of celestial objects. The photo above was taken on a press trip to Russia shortly after the launch of Apollo 12 in 1969, where reporters were able to see the TV camera at the observatory track the rocket on its way to the moon.

Kuprevich’s full paper describing his television camera designs in the Astrophysical Journal in 1962 is available online through Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System.

The development of image intensifiers, or methods for sharpening contrast in faint images and observations in astronomy, was a budding area of research in the early 1960s. In 1961, NASA hosted a symposium on the state of image intensifiers where solar astronomer William Livingston, pictured here using a modified orthicon tube at Kitt Peak National Observatory, presented a paper, “Applications of Image Orthicons in Solar and Stellar Astronomy ,” that detailed success in the application of this modified image orthicon tube to spectrometers at the McMath Solar Observatory.

The orthicon could repeatedly scan and record spectra using the cathode-ray tube which was then integrated numerically with a digital computer to reduce noise and increase accuracy to a precision of 0.01%. The scan rate was able to improve upon the previous method of oversaturating the emulsion on a photographic plate during an exposure, allowing faint scans like the spectra of sunspots to be visible.

Livingston would later go on to use cameras and television to study natural geostationary satellites.

Television was also utilized by meteorologists in the early 1960s for weather satellites, which allowed remote sensing from space for the first time. TIROS , or the Television InfraRed Observation Satellite, was a joint venture between NASA, NOAA, and RCA to create the first weather space satellite. In the 1940s and 50s, RCA had been contracted by the military to explore the feasibility of using a television camera in space for reconnaissance. Images were recorded on magnetic tape that then could be transmitted to Earth once it was back in range.

TIROS-1 was launched in 1960 and was soon followed by three more satellite missions. Over the next two decades, various new generations of TIROS spacecraft were developed as weather satellites, and inspired others. The last of the satellites based on the TIROS design was launched in 2009 and was decommissioned in 2025 after a battery failure. The observations from these satellites aided in daily weather observations and enabled scientists to monitor large-scale cloud phenomena to complement ground-based observatories.

Abraham Schnaf, the project manager for the TRIOS division at RCA, is pictured here with TRIOS-1 before launch. A test vehicle of the original TIROS-1 satellite is now housed at the National Air and Space Museum.

Television for Science Communication

Finally, television has been a medium for science education since its earliest days. Some of the first television programs, educational science lectures and demonstrations, and moon landings broadcast live on television brought science to the home introduced many to the wonders of the physical sciences.

The early days of science public television often consisted of scientists coming on to shows and talking about science, not too different from college lectures with demonstrations. Here we see a shot from a local television program in the Philadelphia area in 1955 with astronomer and inventor Israel Monroe Levitt (left) and physicist William Swann (right).

I.M. Levitt (1908-2004), Director of the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, was a prominent local science communicator; he wrote a regular local column in the newspaper, published several popular books on science, and appeared regularly on radio and television. He was a colleague of Roy K. Marshall, the creator of the first televised science classroom show, who wrote an article for Physics Today in 1949 called “Televising Science,” which gives a good introduction to the early days of science television. Levitt is also known for his theories about “Martian Time .”

William Gray Swann (1885-1962)was an English physicist who, as the first director of the Bartol Research Foundation at the Franklin Institute, was responsible for its relocation to nearby Swarthmore College in 1927. Swann was a popular lecturer and science communicator and made regular appearances on television. He hosted a weekly program in the 1950s in Philadelphia to popularize science.

While it is unclear exactly what show this image is from, given Swann’s and Levitt’s frequent television appearances, it is possible that this is from Swann’s program Horizons Unlimited in the 1950s.

Any discussion of science and television would not be complete without mentioning Don Herbert, aka Mr. Wizard, whose show Watch Mr. Wizard ran for over 15 years. A very popular television personality in the 1950s and 60s, Herbert’s popularity marked a shift in focus from educating not only the general public in science but specifically children.

Herbert inspired many other television science communicators, including Bill Nye, who wrote an obituary for him in the LA Times when he passed away in 2007.

While there are many other examples of science communicators on television, to close out this blog post I wanted to feature this photograph of Timothy Ferris, host of a public television special The Creation of the Universe that aired in 1985 on PBS. The establishment of government funding for public television had a massive impact on allowing science educational programming like PBS Nova to reach a wide audience and created some of the best loved science celebrities that have inspired a generation of scientists.

This shot offers a behind-the-scenes look at the planning of a television broadcast. Ferris wrote and presented the documentary, which received great critical acclaim when it aired. It explores the search for the unifying equation and utilized computer graphics, a novelty at the time, to illustrate physics concepts.

For more on science communication through television and other media, check out our science communication research guide.

We hope you enjoyed this look back at the last 100 years of television in science. From the early days of physicists developing television technology, to the use of television to perform astronomy, and finally the ways television popularized science to the public, television and physics go hand in hand.