Television was never one person's vision -- as early as the 1820s, the idea began to germinate. Certainly by 1880, when a speculative article appeared in The Scientific American magazine, the concept of a working television system began to spread on an international scale.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were a few American laboratories leading the way: Bell, RCA, and GE. It wasn't until 1927, when 21-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth, beat everyone to the punch by producing the first electronic television picture. This historic breakthrough catapulted him into a decades-long patent battle against major corporations, including RCA and CBS. The battle took its toll on everyone and RCA’s David Sarnoff brilliantly marketed this invention to the public and became known as the father of television -- while Philo T. Farnsworth died in relative obscurity.
Experimental broadcast television began in the early 1930s, transmitting fuzzy images of wrestling, music and dance to a handful of screen. It wasn't until the 1939 World's Fair in New York, where RCA unveiled their new NBC TV studios in Rockefeller Plaza, that network television was introduced. A few months later, William Paley’s CBS began broadcasting from its new TV studios in Grand Central Station.
Now that television worked, how could these networks profit on their investment? Who would create the programming that would sell their TV sets? How would they dominate this new commercial medium, without destroying their hugely profitable radio divisions?