Why the World’s First TV Failed—and What It Can Teach You About AI Today

The history of the television holds a valuable lesson about innovators and disruptors.

The Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demonstrates the receiving station of his television in 1926. Photo: Getty Images

Some of the most storied moments in the history of early cinema includes two seconds of people walking in a garden captured by Louis Le Prince, Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery, which sent audiences running out of the theater in fear, and of course Charlie Chaplin’s tomfoolery in The Jazz Singer, which introduced sound on the screen. And then of course there is Victor Fleming’s colorful world of Oz.

We often take the existence and the evolution of the media’s mediums for granted: Try to remember a time where there wasn’t something to watch on TV, and then discuss at the water cooler. But do you remember who invented TV in the first place?

Recently, Erin Blakemore, writer for National Geographic, did us a favor by tracing the sticky, unclear origins of television, answering the question of how exactly we got to our current state of endless streaming.

The technology and history responsible for television

Besides the linguistic history of the word television (the prefix tele meaning “far” or “distant” in Greek is seen in other communicatory technologies like telephone or telegraph), there is an old and rich story that predates the actual rise of the TV. 

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In the late 19th century, scientists were experimenting with the element selenium, seeing how it could convert lightwaves into electrical impulses, eventually producing live images. A telegraph operator in Ireland stumbled across the fact that selenium becomes photosensitive under the influence of sunlight. This led to further research revealing the possibility of light waves being converted into electrical impulses later called selenium “cells.”

These “cells” were patented by German inventor Paul Nipkow in 1885, but technology was still not at the level necessary to produce long-standing moving images. The technology wouldn’t catch up until several decades later, in the 1920s.

On January 26, 1926, Scottish engineer John Logie Baird presented the fruits of his labor. He had been tooling with Nipkow’s ideas, primarily playing with the position of light sources and their photocells to be able to illuminate an object. So on a (presumably) cold January day, Baird cramped 50 people into his London lab to witness the “Televisor.”

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