Of course! And you can thank Marvin Middlemark for the invention of the “rabbit ears” or the “V” TV antennae. Of course, most Millennials reading this might not know what this refers to so here’s a brief description. "Back in the day", way before flat screen TVs and whole-home DVRs, viewers received television signal via antennae. The principle was similar to how a lot of radios and cars functioned with antennae (before sleeker, shark-finned designs became dominant). “Rabbit

Research on recording video on tape was begun in the early 1950's, and Bing Crosby Enterprises demonstrated a prototype system in 1951 that ran at 100 inches/second and had 16 minutes per reel. But the quality was poor. RCA demonstrated a better system in 1953, but it ran at 30 feet/second and only had 4 minutes per reel. The small Ampex Corporation came up with the ideas of using rotating heads, transverse scanning, and FM encoding which allowed broadcast quality recording a

Channel surfing was born more than six decades ago. The first TV remote control, called the “Lazy Bones,” was developed in 1950 by Zenith (then known as Zenith Radio Corporation and now a wholly owned subsidiary of LG Electronics USA). The Lazy Bones used a cable that ran from the TV set to the viewer. A motor in the TV set operated the tuner through the remote control. By pushing buttons on the remote control, viewers rotated the tuner clockwise or counterclockwise, dependin

Inspired by the telegraph and photography, many 19th century inventors sought ways to capture, transmit, and view images by electricity. One of the most influential inventors was Paul Nipkow (1860-1940), who in 1884 proposed a striking new way to translate a visual image into an electrical signal. Nipkow broke up an image into tiny bits by using a rotating "scanning disk." The disk had a spiral of holes bored into it. When the disk rotated, the holes would sweep over the whol