Mechanical television

Mechanical television is an early image-transmission system that used moving parts, such as rotating scanning disks, to divide scenes into lines and reproduce them remotely.

Nipkow disk: A rotating disk with a spiral of holes that scans an image line by line. Its spiral apertures made sequential image scanning mechanically possible.
Paul Nipkow: A German inventor who patented a perforated image-scanning disk in 1884. His disk became the defining mechanical scanning device.
Electronic television: Television systems that use electronic devices to capture, transmit, and display images without mechanical scanning parts. Electronic scanning overcame the speed and image-detail limits of rotating machinery.
Television broadcasting: The transmission of television programs from stations to receivers over radio waves, cable, or networks. Mechanical systems carried some of the earliest scheduled television broadcasts.
Image scanning: The process of sampling an image in a sequence of lines or points for transmission or display. Mechanical television built pictures from successive scanned lines.
John Logie Baird: A Scottish inventor who developed and demonstrated mechanical television systems in the 1920s. His public demonstrations brought mechanical television to a wide audience.
Iconoscope: An early electronic television camera tube that converted optical images into electrical signals. It offered a more sensitive electronic alternative to mechanical image pickup.
BBC television service: The BBC's regular television service, launched in 1936 in London. It began with a temporary alternation between Baird's mechanical system and electronic television.
Photoconductivity: A material's electrical conductivity changes in response to illumination. Photoconductive cells turned changing scene brightness into electrical variations.
Charles Francis Jenkins: An American pioneer of television who developed mechanical image transmission and projection systems. He advanced a separate American path to mechanical television.

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