It started in 1820, when Hans Christian Oersted discovered that electric current in a wire causes a compass needle to orient itself perpendicular to the wire. This was the first clue that electricity and magnetism are not two separate entities, but rather always coexist. In 1861, James Clerk Maxwell published a paper which presents a set of four equations describing the interrelationship between electricity and magnetism.
Between 1886 and 1888, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz did experiment validating one of Maxwell’s theory, that electromagnetic propagates as electromagnetic waves. That time Hertz didn’t realize that his experiment was a set up of basic wireless telecommunication. In 1896, Guglielmo Marconi received British Patent for radio. On 17 December 1902, the first transatlantic radio message is transmitted from Cornwall, United Kingdom to Newfoundland, Canada. Later on, the technology to modulate sound to electromagnetic wave is found and radio is used to transmit sound. Since then, radio has been used for many purposes: military, entertainment, telecommunication, etc.
After the success of sound transmission using electromagnetic waves, some people were curious on the possibility to transmit pictures.
Back in the year 1873, Willoughby Smith discovered photoconductivity, a phemonenon in which a material that is illuminated become more conductive. This became the basic concept of converting visual picture to electrical signal. In 1884, Paul Gottlieb Nipkow invented scanning disk, a mechanical scanning device that is credited as the first image rasterizer.
At the first International Congress of Electricity in 1900, Constantin Perskyi delivered a paper about electromechanical technology in which he used the word “television”. He mentioned the work of Nipkow as practical image transmission technology.
