Using patents, published and unpublished documents, and interviews with television pioneers including Zworykin himself, Abramson reconstructs the inventor's life from his early years in Russia, through his stay as RCA's technical guru under David Sarnoff, to his death in 1982. More than fifty photographs show highlights of Zworykin's work. Abramson notes the contributions of other scientists--particularly Zworykin's biggest rival, Philo T. Farnsworth--to the advancement of television. However, he argues, it was Zworykin's inventions that made modern, all-electronic television possible, causing many to award him the title "father of television". "His achievements rank him with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell," states Albert Abramson in this discerning, often dramatic biography of Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, the Russian-born scientist who "did more to create our present system of cathode-ray television than any other person."

Albert Abramson published (with McFarland) in 1987 a landmark volume titled The History of Television, 1880-1941 ("massive...research"--Library Journal; "voluminous documentation"--Choice; "many striking old photos"--The TV Collector). At last he has produced the follow-up volume; the reader may be assured there is no other book in any language that is remotely comparable to it. Together, these two volumes provide the definitive technical history of the medium. Upon the development in the mid-1940s of new cameras and picture tubes that made commercial television possible worldwide, the medium rose rapidly to prominence. Perhaps even more important was the invention of the video tape recorder in 1956, allowing editing, re-shooting and rebroadcasting. This second volume, 1942 to 2000 covers these significant developments and much more. Chapters are devoted to television during World War II and the postwar era, the development of color television, Ampex Corporation's contributions, television in Europe, the change from helical to high band technology, solid state cameras, the television coverage of Apollo II, the rise of electronic journalism, television entering the studios, the introduction of the camcorder, the demise of RCA at the hands of GE, the domination of Sony and Matsushita, and the future of television in e-cinema and the 1080 P24 format. The book is heavily illustrated (as is the first volume).

Exploring the beginnings of the most influential communications medium of all time, this work covers the history of early mechanical and later electronic means of television. It takes a chronological approach to the subject, from its theoretical conception in the late 1800s, through important market experiments just prior to World War II. Coverage is global and multilingual, with material from French, German, Russian, and English sources. Each chapter begins with a historical essay that places the period in context. After 1927, each chapter focuses on a single year. The coverage weaves together the discoveries and developments in all countries, reporting on the work of solitary inventors, as well as research teams. The text ties together annotated citations that make up the bulk of each chapter, and excerpts from important documents or eyewitness accounts. Each chapter also contains a chronology of the advances and breakthroughs during the period covered. The entire work is carefully cross-referenced and an indexed to provide easy access. Chronology. Index.

Television has never been exclusive to the home. In Television at Work, Kit Hughes explores the forgotten history of how U.S. workplaces used television to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and manage the hearts, minds, and bodies of twentieth century workers. Challenging our longest-held understandings of the medium, Hughes positions television at the heart of a post-Fordist reconfiguration of the American workplace revolving around dehumanized technological systems. Among other things, business and industry built private television networks to distribute programming, created complex CCTV data retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. In uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice, Television at Work reveals how labor arrangements and information architectures shaped by these uses of television were foundational to the rise of the digitally mediated corporation and to a globalizing economy.

It is a modern activity, one of the primary ways we consume information and entertainment, something we’ll do over dinner, at a bar, or even standing on the street peering into a store window—watch TV. Many of us spend countless hours in front of the tube, and even those of us who have proudly eliminated it from our lives can probably still rattle off the names of today’s most popular shows. But for as crucial as television viewing is in modern culture, the television set itself, as a ubiquitous object in our environment, rarely captures our attention—turn one off and it seems to all but disappear. In this book, Chris Horrocks tells the story of the television set, exploring its contradictory presence in our lives as both a material object and a conveyor of illusory images. Horrocks begins in the nineteenth century and television’s prehistory as a fantastic, futuristic concept. He follows the television’s journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments in electro-magnetism to the contested accounts of its actual invention, looking at the work of engineering pioneers such as Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird. Unboxing sets all across the world, he details how it arrived as an essential consumer product and began to play an extraordinary role as a bridge between public and private life. Horrocks describes how the console and cabinet themselves expressed status and good taste and how their designs drew on cultural phenomena such as the space race and the avant-garde. He discusses how we have both loved it for what it can provide and reviled it as a sinister object literally controlling our thoughts, and he shows how it has figured in other cultural realms, such as the work of artists like Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Finally, Horrock laments the death of the cathode ray tube and the emergence of the flat-screen, which has reduced the presence of the television as a significant material object. Altogether, The Joy of Sets brings this most elusive object into crystal-clear critical and historical focus.