Abstract :
The story of television broadcasting may be divided into three periods of time, i.e., the historical period¿to about 1930, the developmental period¿to the end of the Second World War, and the commercial period. One of the first public demonstrations was given by C. Francis Jenkins in Washington, D.C. in 1925. During the 1930\´s the mechanical scanning equipment was replaced with all electronic equipment. The first "network" or long-distance pickup was the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia which was broadcast by the NBC station in New York and the General Electric station in Schenectady. Commercial television was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission, effective July 1, 1941; however it was not until shortly after the end of the Second World War when the electronics industry returned to peace-time conditions that the public became aware of the magic of television in the home. In a relatively short period of time the television broadcasting industry developed from a few stations with very limited programming to a national industry with more than 600 television stations and over 50,000,000 receivers in use by the public. The impact of television has affected the lives of nearly every citizen of this country and its effects are being felt in most of the other countries of the world.
