"The History of Television," courtesy PBS and Your Mayor

PBS is working on an ambitious multipart documentary series on the history of television, whose working title is, inspiredly enough, "The History of Television." It's scheduled to air in spring of 2009, when virtually no one will be able to see it because they'll still have analog TVs rather than the new-fangled digital ones that will be the only ones working then.

Still, those who have upgraded will no doubt be treated to a series rich in incident and context and insight. "Television is a medium in transition and there is no better time to step back and appreciate where it has been and where it is going," Steve Mosko, chairman of the TV Academy Foundation which will co-produce the series with PBS, said. "This is a milestone for our Foundation, a milestone that may well, given what the euphemism 'a medium in transition' means, signal the final nail in Television's coffin."

In a bald effort to get myself hired as a "talking head/expert" for this upcoming documentary miniseries - or, at least, to land a gig as ghostwriter for the inevitable coffee-table-book autobiography of Mr. Television - Your Mayor has thoughtfully undertaken the massive challenge of writing the first draft for both, in a magnum opus we like to call:

The History of Television: A History of Television

Chapter One: Origins and Afterbirth of a New Medium

In the 1920s, Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin separately developed versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes. Farnsworth based his "television" on a tiny screen that came from a 1980s movie theater that chopped up its single screen into a series of much smaller, virtually unworkable ones that he found inside a time machine developed in 2006 that landed on his doorstep in 1924, alongside a note that read, "Is this possible?"

Not sure how to read the note, Farnsworth took up the challenge and his invention opened up a new world of possibilities for the "TeeVee Camera," which had been developed in 1514 by Leonardo da Vinci but abandoned and nearly consigned to the scrapheap of history due to its having, at the time of its conception, no practical applications.

In London, 1926, John Logie Baird presented the world's first television images: A ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" making wan quips about the day's events ("Stooky Bill" would later rename himself "Jay Leno"). Only 29 people saw this first "broadcast," six of those via bootlegged cable. Critics were instantly divided on the presentation: While the Evening Standard declared, "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen" (a prophetic statement, though one whose meaning eluded citizens at the time), Daily Variety groused, "Wooden perf makes this a less-than-boffo preme; expect so-so jingle at the coffers."

NBC made its first public television broadcast on April 30, 1939, presenting the opening of the 1927 New York World's Fair on tape delay (a practice it would later perfect in its Olympic coverage). By the end of the year, its programming was received by an estimated 2,000 sets, though some 650 of those sets, again, were receiving the signal via bootlegged cable.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with plaintive passage from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" playing in background): "It was a miracle, those first TVs. Things were moving around; you could hear something akin to noise. It was just like real life, only tiny and muffled and in black and white. Kind of like my first marriage."

World War II proved an absolute boon to those not aware of the nascent television industry, as production of new TVs and other broadcasting equipment for civilian purposes was suspended from April 1942 to August 1945 by decree of President Franklin Roosevelt who, in declaring "The only thing we have to fear is death itself," banned images of soldiers returning home in flag-draped coffins. (This gambit was revisited during the War in Iraq in the 2000s by President George W. Bush, who, not up to the task of quelling the proliferation of televisions nor capable of banning soldiers' deaths, made cameras and legitimate TV reporters illegal.)

Nonetheless, Television was on its way, and only an over-proliferation of programming choices, a burgeoning public wariness in a monopolized ownership of the medium being consigned to a precious few corporate ideologies and a radical new technology that offered both a greater democratization in communications and the specter of ubiquitous piracy of content could threaten its robust financial future. Like that was ever gonna happen.

Coming soon: Chapter 2, on the '50s, which we understand were very influential.