In the half century since its commercial unveiling, television has become the undisputed master of communications media, revolutionizing the way postwar generations have viewed the world. Yet almost no one in America knows how television was created, who created it, or how it actually works. The inventors of television were a diverse group of iconoclasts from different corners of the world - including an Idaho farm boy turned college dropout, an eccentric, sickly Scotsman, and two Russian Americans. These men - Philo T. Farnsworth, John Logie Baird, Charles Francis Jenkins, Ernst Alexanderson, Vladimir Zworykin, and the corporate visionary David Sarnoff - each had one eye on the others as they raced for fortune and scientific glory. Tube traces their progress, from the laboratory prototypes that drew public laughter to the vicious courtroom battles for control of what would become an enormous market power. Taking us through the advent of "living color" and beyond, authors David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher conclude with a forecast of the latest digital technologies and their impact. "Sir Thomas Beecham says he believes that television can do much to improve the musical taste of the nation. " -- The London Times , September 1, 1936 "It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the American nation." -- David Sarnoff "Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it." -- C.P. Scott, editor, Manchester Guardian, 1928 Having been involved with the Internet since 1981, I have watched discussions about the promise and perils of computer networks with an ever-growing suspicion that this drama had been played out before. In 1992, I began collecting books, articles, and data about the early history of telephony, radio, and television, with an eye toward writing a history of these past technologies that would enlighten current debates. Thankfully, Fisher and Fisher have written the book about the history of television that I would have written--and in a much more expert fashion than I could have hoped. In the tradition of the Sloan Foundation Technology Series other superb books (such as The Invention That Changed the World (about radar) and Computer: A History of the Information Machine ), this is technological history at its best: informed about technology and the institutional and commercial matrices within which it works, and populated by a fully-realized cast of eccentric geniuses, captains of industry, and multinational corporations jockeying for mastery of a jillion-dollar industry. Very Highly Recommended. A gallery of visionaries, eccentric geniuses, and hard-boiled businessmen fill this gripping rendition of the creation of the tube. We might have nicknamed television the "disk" had the competing mechanical method of transmitting pictures been triumphant. The Fishers' story of its failure and of Briton John Logie Baird's triumph is an engaging blend of technical explanation and biography. Their narrative of Baird and others evokes an archetype, the independent inventor, all but eliminated in the modern age of corporate-or government-sponsored research. Television, among the last revolutionary devices invented by individual visionaries, attracted colorful figures in addition to Baird: Philo Farnsworth, an Idaho farm boy who transmitted the first electronic picture in 1927; Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant who developed the electron-gun picture tube; and the legendary David Sarnoff, the RCA chief determined to rule TV even while the box was but an ungainly knot of electrical ganglia in the inventors' workshops. A Farnsworth victory in a patent suit denied Sarnoff total manufacturing control, but he still pioneered broadcasting. An informative, entertaining account of the box, its earliest broadcasts, and the ambitions that drove the people who created it, which will be enhanced by a related American Experience program to air on PBS in early 1997, featuring interviews with David Fisher. Gilbert Taylor Cogent technological exposition combines with Saturday- matinee melodrama to create a nearly moving saga of the many men who wanted singlehandedly to create what one inventor called ``radiovision.'' Beginning with an 1872 experiment on selenium rods that made British engineer Willoughby Smith imagine a system of ``visual telegraphy,'' Scientist David Fisher (Univ. of Miami; The Scariest Place on Earth 1994, etc.) and son, freelance writer Marshall Fisher, chart the scientific progression that culminated with the debut of commercial television programming in 1941. Throughout, they stress the linked discoveries that made it possible: British inventor John Logie Baird's 1923 electrified hatbox with Nipkow disks, which constituted the world's first working television set; the cathode-ray Image Dissector of young American inventor Philo Farnsworth; Russian-American scientist