Television spreads

The story

Pictures that travel

The idea of sending pictures over a distance is almost as old as radio. In 1884 a young German, Paul Nipkow, invented a disc with holes in it that, as it spun, broke a picture up into lots of dots. It was the beginning. In the 1920s the Scotsman John Logie Baird showed in London a first transmission of blurry pictures using a mechanical system, and in the same years two inventors, the American Philo Farnsworth, aged twenty-one, and the Russian-American Vladimir Zworykin, built the first completely electronic systems, with a tube that formed the picture using a beam of electrons. These systems proved to be the best.

The first regular “high-definition” television service began in England, with the BBC, on 2 November 1936, from a building in London, Alexandra Palace. Very few families had a set, but already in 1937 the BBC broadcast the coronation of King George VI live. In 1939 television was presented to the public, in the United States, at the World's Fair in New York. Then came the war, and television was almost entirely stopped.

In the 1950s

After the war, television spread at an incredible speed. In the United States, in 1950, fewer than one family in ten had a television; by 1955 it was already two families in three. In Britain, the great boost was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, on 2 June 1953: about twenty million people, almost half the country, watched it live, often at the homes of neighbours or friends who had a set, or in public places.

Televisions were big wooden cabinets with a small black-and-white screen, and they cost a lot: in Italy, in the mid-1950s, a set cost as much as several months of a factory worker's wages. So people often gathered in bars or in the homes of those who had one, or in party offices and parishes: the whole neighbourhood sat in front of the screen.

Television in Italy

In Italy the regular RAI broadcasts began on 3 January 1954, after some years of trials: the first pictures had come from Turin, Milan and Rome. The first to appear, to welcome the viewers, was the announcer Fulvia Colombo. At the end of 1954 there were some tens of thousands of subscribers, and ten years later more than five million.

There were few programmes, shown for only a few hours a day: the news, variety shows, TV dramas, football matches, and quiz shows such as “Lascia o raddoppia?” (“Double or Nothing?”, 1955), hosted by Mike Bongiorno, which emptied the streets because everyone ran home or to the bar to watch it. From 1957 “Carosello” was on the air, short advertising films with little stories that fascinated young and old, and after which children went to bed.

A special programme was “Non è mai troppo tardi” (“It's Never Too Late”), which began in 1960: a teacher, Alberto Manzi, taught adults on television to read and write if they had not been able to go to school. It is estimated that thanks to these lessons more than a million Italians learned to read and write. Television also helped to unify the way people spoke: before, many Italians used only their dialect, whereas now everyone was listening to the same Italian language.

An invention that changes habits

Television changed everyday life: in the evening many families gathered in front of the screen, children waited for their programmes, people followed the same shows and talked about the same characters. It changed politics: in 1960, in the first televised debate between two candidates, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, many thought that Kennedy had won, as he was more confident and at ease in front of the cameras. Colour arrived in the United States in the 1950s and in Italy in 1977.