Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 27 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

This article takes a look at the early history of television, which is usually overshadowed by the assumptions of the primacy of film as a moving-image medium and the efforts to stabilize the medium. The article begins with a discussion of the origins of television and provides a working definition of the term “television.” It then outlines the history of television and identifies who invented television. The concept of interpretive flexibility and the possible sequence of the arrival of television and film are discussed.

Keywords: early history, television, moving-image, origins, working definition, interpretive flexibility

William Uricchio

William Uricchio is professor and director of comparative media studies at MIT and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.