BBC Begins the World's First Regular Television Service

Date

2 November 1936

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

United Kingdom

Era

Modern

Significance

On 2 November 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation began the world's first regular, public, high-definition television service from studios at Alexandra Palace in north London.

Two rival systems were trialled on alternating weeks, John Logie Baird's 240-line mechanical-scan system and the electronic 405-line Marconi-EMI system, with the latter selected in early 1937. Programming was initially limited to roughly two hours a day for the few thousand households able to afford receivers within range of the transmitter. Though small in audience, the launch marked the practical birth of the television age as a scheduled broadcasting institution rather than an experimental novelty. The 405-line standard established here influenced subsequent television engineering, and the BBC's model of regular studio programming set precedents for the medium worldwide. After a wartime suspension from 1939, the service resumed in 1946 and television expanded rapidly across industrialised nations, eventually displacing radio as the dominant household medium and reshaping news, entertainment, advertising, and political communication for the remainder of the century.

Empires active in 2 November 1936

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Bessemer announces a cheap steel process
  1856
• Discovery of nuclear fission
  December 1938 (explained January–February 1939)
• Penicillin and the dawn of the antibiotic era
  1928 (developed for clinical use 1940–1945)
• Formulation of quantum mechanics
  1925–1927
• Haber-Bosch Process Industrialises Synthetic Nitrogen Fertiliser
  September 1913
• The Wright Brothers' Powered Flight
  17 December 1903

Also relevant

• Turing Defines the Computer in "On Computable Numbers"
  1936

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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