A difficult question, the television we watch today is based on a few concepts that were all brought together to create the modern day television. There is the mechanical side of things, and the electronic side of things.
The electromechanical television was first patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. It was a spinning disk design that Nipkow patented but it wasn't until 1907 that the amplification tube technology was created to make Nipkow's design practical. In 1911 Boris Rosing and Vladimir Kosma Zworykin created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner. This scanner would transmit 'very crude images' over wires to the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) in the receiver. At this stage, televisions were only able to project still images. In 1925 John Logie Baird demonstrated a televised silhouette of images, but these were still basically still images on a spinning disk. In 1928 Baird's company send the first transatlantic television signal, it went form London to New York. They also broadcasted the first ship to shore television signal.
These electromechanical discoveries were just the first stepping stones towards television as we see it today. Electronic television would bring us the rest of the way. The concept of an electronic television using CRTs, in which an electron beam in both camera and receiver would produce moving pictures, was thought up by A. A. Campbell-Swinton around 1908. The CRT was the only successful concept from Swinton. Philo Taylor Farnsworth created the first fully electronic system in 1927, although the image could only be seen on a plate of glass painted black. Seven years later Farnsworth made some improvements and his television was able to show events happening live, the events that were within range of Farnsworth's cameras anyway.
Color television was first demonstrated in 1928 using scanning disks, the first electronic television demonstration was not until 1940.
The first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began in 1928, but the first eighteen months consisted of only silhouette images.
The technology has been improved many times since the days of the first televisions. It is difficult to pin point the invention of television due to the fact that people were inventing different aspects of television as we know it. Not only did the images have to be displayed somehow, but they had to be received by the television as well. Today we do not consider there to be one inventor of the television, or say there was one day that television was released. It was a real group effort.
The first commercially made television sets were sold between 1928 and 1934 in the UK, US and Russia, mainly by Baird. These were radios that had an additional television device. This device would not measure up to our TV's today though. It was a neon tube with one of Nipkow's disks which produced an image about twice the size of a postage stamp. This device was called the televisor.
The first commercially made television sets with CRTs, that's what you probably have at home, LCDs and plasmas do not have CRTs, were sold in 1934 in Germany. Britain began making these televisions in 1936 and the US in 1938. The cheapest American set had a three inch screen, try watching a football game on that!
There's always a new TV just around the corner.
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