The first public demonstration of television was given when a speech of Commerce Secretary Hoover, given in Washington, was shown simultaneously to a group of investors on New York. The medium would eventually change the world.

The idea of scanning images and transmitting an image was first proposed in the 1840’s. The first demonstration of the concept took place in Paris in 1909 by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier who were able to demonstrate the transmission of an image of the alphabet. They used a matrix of selenium cells which was used as a Retina. The picture was updated every few seconds.

On March 25, 1925, the first public demonstration of a moving image being transmitted was done at the Selfridge Department Store in London. At the same time in the United States, Charles Francis Jenkins was working on developing a television. In 1913 he published a paper called “Motion Pictures by Wireless.” In 1923 he succeeded in transmitting images for the first time. In 1925 he publicly demonstrated the TV for the first time when an image was sent from a naval radio station to his lab five miles later. The first very public demonstration of TV took place on April 7, 1927, when Herbert Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Labs were able to demonstrate a high quality moving image of different people synchronized with sound. One of the those who took part in the demonstration of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.