Seeing by electricity: The emergence of television and the modern mediascape, 1878--1939

The dissertation explores the earliest stages in the history of television, from the emergence of the initial ideas about moving image transmission in the late 1870s up until the launching of television broadcasts in the 1930s. It draws on a varied body of technological, theoretical, literary, and popular accounts, in order to reconstruct the vigorous historical anticipatory debates regarding the coming of television in various national and cultural contexts. My historiographic approach responds to current scholarship in new media studies and in media archaeology by reconsidering the history of the relationship between cinema and television and highlighting important precedents to current debated on emerging digital media. I argue for a long multifaceted history of interactions between film and television, which started not in the institutional and economic rivalry of the 1950s, but can be traced back to their origins.;The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first two chapters deal with the speculative phase in the history of television, between 1878 and 1926, when the idea of televisual transmission existed in technological and imaginary discourses but have not been realized. The concern of these chapters is to place the emergence of the initial ideas of television parallel to the emergence of cinema and the silent-film era, in the context of the rise of modern technology, visual culture, and scientific and cultural discourses on the human senses. The final two chapters concentrate on the experimental stage in television history, starting with the initial successful demonstrations of moving image transmission in 1926 and ending in 1939, when World War Two put an end to the rapid advances in public television services. These chapters focus on how television became a mass medium and a part of what would later be called "the culture industry," as well as explores how popular discourses and writings by classical film theories addressed the question of television's medium specific properties.