Television

Discussion Questions

1. Television was first invented in 1886 by a German student, Paul Nipcow. How much television do you watch in one week? How would you spend your time if television had never been invented? 2. RCA's David Sarnoff was credited for bringing television to the masses at the 1939 World's Fair with President Roosevelt speaking. If television were invented today, with what programming would you choose to debut the new invention and why? 3. The first color television camera was the TK 41. Describe how would black and white television change the programs you watch? 4. The most recent invention in television is digital technology. Explain what could you invent to improve television programming and viewership? 5. Video recording has revolutionized the television industry and brought about channels like CNN, ESPN, and MTV. What would television be like for you without these channels? Describe the target audiences for these channels. 6. How will the agent or Intelligence Search Software affect your choice of television shows?

Links

The Farnsworth Chronicles This is a concise and easily accessible site detailing the efforts of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of modern television. Exploratorium Exhibits Exciting online demos and guided discovery help explain how we come to "make pictures" on the tube. Vocabulary Click on any of the vocabulary words below to hear them pronounced and used in a sentence.    fiber-optic Definition: Relating to thin transparent fibers of glass or plastic that are enclosed by material of a lower index of refraction and that transmit light throughout their length by internal reflections. Context: The signal will be captured and temporarily be converted into laser light and fed down long strands of glass called fiber-optic lines.    bit Definition: A unit of computer information equivalent to the result of a choice between two alternatives (e.g., yes or no, on or off). Context: A television camera breaks the scene into bits and scans the world a bit at a time.    vacuum tubes Definition: An electron tube evacuated to a high degree of vacuum. Context: For the next 60 years, television cameras used vacuum tubes.    prism Definition: A transparent body that is bounded in part by two nonparallel plane faces and is used to refract or disperse a beam of light. Context: In broadcast color cameras, the light streaming through the lens enters a prism, which does the usual prism thing, splitting the light into three colors.    ray gun Definition: A device which fires a stream of electrons toward a fluorescent screen. The direction of the stream is controlled by a magnetic field within a cathode ray tube (the point of origin for the stream). Context: There is a ray gun at the back of the picture tube firing a thin beam to light up a tiny dot on your screen.    record head Definition: An electromagnetic strip device which imparts a characteristic pattern on a storage medium such as magnetic tape, thereby saving information to the storage medium. Context: All magnetic recording begins with an electromagnet called a record head.    segmentation Definition: The process of dividing into segments. Context: He could get rid of segmentation by a nice long scan with a tape wrapped around this big drum.    analog Definition: Relating to a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities (such as voltages). Context: We live in an analog world.    digital Definition: Relating to data in the form of numerical digits. Context: To make our analog world digital it must be converted.    agent Definition: One who is authorized to act for or in the place of another. Context: And these days you use the word agents to do that.    Intelligence Search Software Definition: Computer instructions, customized to the preferences of an individual. Context: And the term agent refers to Intelligence Search Software that will be programmed to know what each family member likes.