W3XK, the first American TV station, begins broadcasting from suburban Washington, DC.
The station was the doing of Charles Francis Jenkins, who devised a way to transmit pictures over the airwaves, a process he called radiovision. He sold several thousand receivers, mostly to hobbyists, and, after obtaining permission to start an experimental TV transmitting station, aired “radiomovies” five nights a week until he closed the station in 1932.
Jenkins essentially brought the wrong technology to the field: his receiving sets relied on a forty-eight-line image projected onto a six-inch-square mirror to create the picture, rather than on electronics, the technology that ultimately determined the future of television.
A wholly electronic scanning technology was outlined by A.A. Campbell-Swinton as early as 1908 (see here), but it wasn’t ready for prime time (or almost any other time) until the public finally got a good look at it, during the New York World’s Fair in 1939 (see here).
An interesting aside: Jenkins was also the first to air a television commercial. He was fined by the government for doing so. Unfortunately those fines stopped when the medium matured.
The first legal TV commercials didn’t appear until 1941, and the first show with its own sponsor didn’t air until five years after that (see here).—TL