IX 



NEW TELEVISION AND RADIO 

 SERVICES 



"How MUCH longer will television be 'just around the cor- 

 ner'?" Many of us have been a little puzzled about the ex- 

 tremely slow development of this field. As far as the layman 

 is concerned, there seems to be no reason why television sets 

 should not have been manufactured on just about the same 

 scale as radio sets prior to America's entry into the war. 



A glance backward over the progress of radio will reveal 

 one or two surprising facts about this, however. Radio was 

 "just around the corner" in 1883 when Thomas Edison dis- 

 covered that there was a one-way flow of electricity through 

 the vacuum in an electric-light bulb. Radio seemed to draw 

 nearer when in 1903 J. A. Fleming developed the diode, a 

 two-element vacuum tube which could turn alternating cur- 

 rent into direct current. Radio seemed to have turned the cor- 

 ner when in 1907 Lee de Forest developed the triode, or 

 three-element tube with the grid the very heart of radio. But 

 when the first World War drew to a close in 1918 radio was 

 still "just around the corner." Not until 1921 did station 

 KDKA inaugurate broadcasting. Even then the situation 

 seemed none too promising. 



Briefly, there was a lapse of more than forty years between 

 the discovery of the factors that form the basis of radio trans- 

 mission and the manufacture and sale of radio sets for gen- 

 eral use by the public. To be sure, a long period of education 



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