• Question: who invented the television and the web camera

    Asked by xkeex to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 27 Jun 2012:


      Hi xkeex,

      The television was invented by a Scotsman, John Logie Baird who invented the television. The web camera I am not sure who invented, but it came about when someone came up with the idea of using a video camera and streaming what it was recording over the internet, who did it first, I don’t know!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 28 Jun 2012:


      Hi xkeex,
      Yep, the television was invented by John Logie Baird in the 1920s. Cinema had already been around for about 30 years by this point.

      I think digital cameras were invented in the 1970s. They were actually invented by Kodak, the camera company. But they didn’t want digital cameras getting out there and spoiling the market for photographic film (Kodak were the world’s largest sellers of photo film). So they didn’t do anything with their invention.

      Of course, other companies soon caught up and developed digital cameras, and now we all have them and noone buys photo film anymore, and I think Kodak have pretty much gone out of business. It was a really bad business decision – they could have been the world leaders in digital cameras, but they wanted to protect their martket for photographic film, and so they fell behind and went bust.

      Once digital cameras had been invented, it was a fairly small step to plug them into computers and broadcast the images over the web.

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