Jun 3, 2008 By Al Owens 6 min read

(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series)Television has always been the source of great fascination to me. I’ve watched it most of my nearly 60 years. I’ve even made my living while appearing on it. Yet, I still marvel at how it is possible that I can sit in my home and still witness events that are occurring around the world, in space and even on the moon at the same time.

All it takes is to push a button for me to be transported to the scene of events that could, someday, be written into our history books – and I can see those events with startling clarity.

Television, for all of its flaws, has become the world’s diary. But it didn’t start out that way.

Upon close examination, I discovered it had little prospects of playing such an important role in our lives in its earliest state of development.

In the 1870s, scientists had discovered a chemical known as selenium, which would respond to varying degrees of light. (Even today, that’s all television is. A display that receives varying degrees of light from some external source).

That discovery was first made in 1873. I’ve found an article printed in the Marysville (Ohio) County Journal on Dec. 28, 1876, which theorized about the possible use of selenium in the development of an artificial eye. “We wish we that we could add that it gives vision to the blind; but we can not, though, perhaps, it gives promise in that direction,” claimed the scientist Dr. C.W. Siemans.

It was some years later, but still over a hundred years ago, that the word “television” (or seeing at a distance) was used by those people who were still experimenting with selenium.

In the Sunday edition of the New York Times on Feb. 24, 1907, there appeared a long article about the experiments of Dr. Arthur Korn, a physics professor at the University of Munich (Germany).

Korn had successfully used selenium to transmit the image of the Kaiser over a telegraph line a thousand miles away.

Suddenly, there was hope that such an experiment would lead to, “lovers conversing at a distance.” Or that “doctors will be able to examine patient’s tongues in another city.”

There were no predictions of a show like “American Idol.’ Something, perhaps that would have given Dr. Korn pause about proceeding with anymore experiments.

Over the next few years, scientists across the world began experimenting with selenium, and, at the same time, they were coming up with some rather odd applications for which the television could be used.

In 1910, a German scientist was quoted as saying, “A death-bed scene, a last look at some dying dear one, would even be within the range of possibilities.” (I’m thinking that could be the only thing worse than nightly episodes of “American Idol.’ But that’s just me)

Two years later, there came word of a new method of placing electrically transmitted images onto a screen – the cathode ray tube. That is a method that is still in wide use today in computer monitors and in television sets.

By 1923, while inventors and scientists frequently predicted that television as an essential element of home life was “only a year or two away,” there was only a hint that television wouldn’t be transmitted by telegraph line or by telephone – but through waves, similar to methods used in broadcasting radio signals.

In July of 1923, the Cumberland Evening Times in Cumberland, Md., expressed a great deal of apprehension about the possibility that television would eventually be used to broadcast live sporting events.

“The owners of baseball grounds and prizefight promoters, looking out for their own financial interests, would put a stop to the broadcasting of their programs altogether,” wrote a writer with a decidedly imperfect crystal ball that day.

He probably had no idea that the owners of every major sports team and fight promoters could hitch their fortunes to the success of their sporting endeavors by using something else that had not yet been invented – the television commercial. (The first officially sponsored television program is said to have taken place in 1930 in Passaic, N.J. That, by the way, was the same year the first store was opened that sold only television sets, in Evanston, Ill.)

In 1924, there had been a demonstration of a television broadcast in New York City. In 1925, the Uniontown Morning Herald reported that a few high-ranking government officials sat in a Washington laboratory and watched a moving windmill five miles away on a television screen.

In 1927, after experimental television broadcasts had taken place between Europe and the United States, the Morning Herald published a cartoon that reflected a rather unsettling version of that event. It showed Uncle Sam on one end of a telephone saying, “We love you dearly.” He’s talking to a female Europe with a club in her hand that reads: HATRED.

That cartoon appeared one day after it was announced that nightly broadcasts were about to be sent out over an American syndicate that had rights in this country, as well as in Canada and Mexico.

Those broadcasts, according to the Morning Herald, would show the head and shoulders of a person speaking directly into a microphone.

Television was not yet practical, but it had certainly, by then, become more than a mere dream.

But practicality was well on the way. The Morning Herald reported late in 1927, that there were estimates that the average television set for the home use would be about $150.

In September of 1927, the Morning Herald was brimming with anticipation. “Who can tell how soon the time will come when waiting thousands will be able to stand before some form of screen and see as well as hear the “blow by blow” and “play by play” and the great national and international events,” asked the editorial writer. But that writer asked a question that would even be quite relevant today.

These days, with the high definition images, and crystal clear audio that is available on hundreds of television outlets, I can only echo the words of that Morning Herald editorial writer had about the, as yet to be fully realized invention known as the television – “Truly we live in an age of miracles and marvels.”

I’ll have much more about the development of television – and the impact it has had on our lives – in next week’s column.

Edward A. Owens of Uniontown is webmaster of “Red Raider Nation: Where Champions Live.’ E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net