Many people worked to create television. It 1862, Abbe Giovanna Caselli invented a machine called the Pantelegraph. Caselli was the first person to send a picture over wires. By the 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell invented a machine that transmitted pictures and sound over wires. His machine was called the Photophone. The World’s Fair was held in Paris, France, in the year 1900. The first International Congress of Electricity was held at the World’s Fair.
That was when the word television was first used – by a Russian named Constantin Perskyi. That name stuck, and is now shortened to “TV.” At the beginning of TV history, there were several types of TV technology.
One system was a mechanical model based on a rotating disc. (Rotating discs are discs that spin like CDs) The other system was an electronic model. In 1906, Boris Rosing built in England and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States, demonstrated improved mechanical systems. Philo Taylor Farnsworth also showed an electronic system in San Francisco in 1927. His TV was the forerunner of today’s TV , which is an electronic system based on his ideas. Now TV is everywhere. Before 1947, there were only a few thousand television in the U.S. By the 1990s, there were televisions in 98% of American homes.