A Timeline of Broadcast Technology

1860Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville — Phonautogram of 'Au clair de la lune' recorded 9 April 1860; played back for the first time in 2008 by optical scanning at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (demonstrated)

1861Philipp Reis — Telephon demonstrated to the Physikalischer Verein, Frankfurt, 26 October 1861 (demonstrated)

1869Louis Ducos du Hauron — Publication of Les Couleurs en photographie, solution du problème, describing both additive and subtractive three-colour methods (published)

1877Charles Cros — Sealed envelope deposited with the Académie des sciences, 30 April 1877, opened December 1877 (published)

1887Granville T. Woods — US patent 373,915 for the synchronous multiplex railway telegraph granted 29 November 1887 (patent granted)

1892William Kennedy Laurie Dickson — 35 mm Kinetograph camera essentially finalised at the Edison laboratory; Kinetoscope unveiled at the Brooklyn Institute 9 May 1893 (demonstrated)

1894Oliver Lodge — Royal Institution memorial lecture for Hertz, 1 June 1894, transmitting and detecting over about 50 metres (demonstrated)

1895Alexander Stepanovich Popov — Receiver demonstrated to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society, St Petersburg, 7 May 1895 (demonstrated)

1895Jagadish Chandra Bose — Transmission at roughly 60 GHz over about 23 metres through two walls at Presidency College, Calcutta, ringing a bell and igniting gunpowder (demonstrated)

1898Valdemar Poulsen — Telegraphone demonstrated; grand prix at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he recorded the Emperor Franz Joseph (demonstrated)

1906Alice Guy-Blaché — Gaumont Chronophone phonoscènes produced in volume under her direction in Paris (commercial release)

1908Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton — Letter 'Distant Electric Vision' published in Nature, 18 June 1908; elaborated with circuit diagrams in his 1911 Röntgen Society presidential address (published)

1909Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky — Received Tsarist authorisation and a railway carriage darkroom to photograph the Empire in colour (demonstrated)

1911Boris Rosing — CRT receiver demonstrated in St Petersburg; patented from 1907 (demonstrated)

1912Charles Herrold — Weekly scheduled programmes broadcast from San Jose, California, using an arc transmitter of his own design (first service)

1912Rudolf Fischer — German patents on colour couplers and chromogenic development filed (patent filed)

1916Edward Christopher Wente — US patent application for the condenser transmitter filed at Western Electric; published in Physical Review 1917 (patent filed)

1926Hidetsugu Yagi — Yagi-Uda array developed at Tohoku Imperial University; Yagi's English-language paper carried it to the West in 1928 (published)

1926Kenjiro Takayanagi — The katakana character イ displayed at 40 lines on a CRT at Hamamatsu Technical High School, 25 December 1926 (demonstrated)

1926Kálmán Tihanyi — First television patent application filed 20 March 1926, patented as 'Radioskop'; inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register 4 September 2001 (patent filed)

1926Shintaro Uda — Series of papers on the directional array published in Japanese at Tohoku Imperial University (published)

1928Fritz Pfleumer — German patent for paper-backed magnetic tape filed; licensed to AEG in 1932 (patent filed)

1928Georg Neumann — Neumann CMV 3 released, the first commercial condenser microphone (commercial release)

1928Harry Nyquist — 'Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory' published in Transactions of the AIEE (published)

1928Leonard Troland — Technicolor Process 3 dye-transfer printing put into production under his direction (commercial release)

1930Fritz Schröter — Interlacing patent filed at Telefunken (patent filed)

1931Alan Dower Blumlein — UK patent 394,325 filed 14 December 1931, accepted 14 June 1933 (patent filed)

1933Harvey Fletcher — Three-channel stereophonic transmission of the Philadelphia Orchestra from Philadelphia to Constitution Hall, Washington, 27 April 1933 (demonstrated)

1934Clara Rockmore — Carnegie Hall debut recital establishing the theremin as a concert instrument (demonstrated)

1935Leopold Godowsky Jr. — Kodachrome released commercially as 16 mm movie film (commercial release)

1935Leopold Mannes — Kodachrome released commercially; Kodak had hired the pair in 1930 to finish the work (commercial release)

1935Natalie Kalmus — 'Color Consciousness' published in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (published)

1936Dorothy Nickerson — Publication of the Nickerson index of fading and colour difference work at the US Department of Agriculture (published)

1936Isaac Shoenberg — BBC service from Alexandra Palace opens 2 November 1936, alternating Marconi-EMI's 405-line electronic system with Baird's 240-line mechanical one (first service)

1939Homer Dudley — Voder demonstrated at the New York World's Fair, played by trained operators (demonstrated)

1940Walter Weber — AC bias applied to the Magnetophon at the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft laboratory with Hans-Joachim von Braunmühl (demonstrated)

1942Hedy Lamarr — US patent 2,292,387 granted to Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil, 11 August 1942 (patent granted)

1944Marvin Camras — US patent 2,351,004 for the method and means of magnetic recording granted; his wire recorders were used for wartime deception (patent granted)

1946Jack Mullin — Demonstration at NBC in San Francisco, May 1946, using machines assembled from components shipped home from Bad Nauheim in 1945 (demonstrated)

1952David A. Huffman — 'A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes' published in the Proceedings of the IRE (published)

1956Bebe Barron — Forbidden Planet released with an all-electronic score credited as 'electronic tonalities' (commercial release)

1956Charles Ginsburg — VRX-1000 quadruplex recorder demonstrated at the NARTB convention, Chicago, 14 April 1956 (demonstrated)

1956Fred Pfost — VRX-1000 demonstrated, 14 April 1956, with heads of his design (demonstrated)

1957Russell Kirsch — Photograph of his infant son scanned on SEAC at the US National Bureau of Standards (demonstrated)

1959Daphne Oram — Oramics machine development began at Tower Folly, Kent, with engineer Graham Wrench, funded by Gulbenkian grants (demonstrated)

1959Otis Boykin — US patent 2,891,227 for an electrical resistor granted 16 June 1959 (patent granted)

1962Gerhard Sessler — Electret microphone developed with James West at Bell Labs (demonstrated)

1962James Edward Maceo West — Electret microphone developed with Gerhard Sessler at Bell Labs; US patent 3,118,022 granted 1964 (demonstrated)

1962Walter Bruch — PAL system developed at Telefunken; presented to the European Broadcasting Union in January 1963 (demonstrated)

1963Delia Derbyshire — Doctor Who theme realised at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from Ron Grainer's score (first service)

1963Lou Ottens — Compact Cassette introduced at the Berlin Funkausstellung; Philips licensed it royalty-free worldwide (commercial release)

1965Don Buchla — Buchla 100 series built for the San Francisco Tape Music Center (commercial release)

1969Marie Van Brittan Brown — US patent 3,482,037 granted 2 December 1969, filed with her husband Albert Brown in 1966 (patent granted)

1971Erna Schneider Hoover — US patent 3,623,007 granted 23 November 1971 — among the first software patents ever issued (patent granted)

1971Michael Tompsett — First CCD-captured images produced at Bell Labs; his wife's portrait became the first CCD photograph published (demonstrated)

1974Nasir Ahmed — 'Discrete Cosine Transform' published with T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao in IEEE Transactions on Computers, January 1974 (published)

1974Suzanne Ciani — Sound design work for advertising and the Xenon pinball machine voice, produced on Buchla systems (commercial release)

1974T. Natarajan — DCT published with Ahmed and Rao (published)

1975Steven Sasson — First digital photograph captured on the Kodak prototype, December 1975 (demonstrated)

1976Bryce Bayer — US patent 3,971,065, 'Color imaging array', granted 20 July 1976 (patent granted)

1977Jacob Ziv — 'A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression' published with Abraham Lempel in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (published)

1980Valerie Thomas — US patent 4,229,761 for the illusion transmitter granted 21 October 1980 (patent granted)

1984Kerns H. Powers — 16:9 derivation presented at SMPTE working-group discussions on a common image format, adopted into the international HDTV standard (published)

1985Radia Perlman — Spanning tree algorithm developed at Digital Equipment Corporation; standardised as IEEE 802.1D (published)

1992Jesse Eugene Russell — US patent for a digital cellular base station system granted; his AT&T work drove the analogue-to-digital transition (patent granted)

1992Joan L. Mitchell — JPEG standard ISO/IEC 10918-1 published; her JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard with William Pennebaker followed in 1993 (published)

1993Eric Fossum — CMOS active pixel sensor developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and published (published)

2009Roger Pantos — HTTP Live Streaming specification submitted to the IETF as an Internet-Draft, May 2009 (published)