At three o'clock in the afternoon on November 2, 1936, a curtain went up at Alexandra Palace on a hill in north London, and a singer named Adele Dixon stepped in front of a clunky black-and-white camera to sing a song called Television. Almost no one heard her - only a few hundred families in Britain owned a TV set, because the boxes cost about as much as a small car. But that little broadcast was the official start of the world's first regular high-definition television service.
The BBC actually ran two competing systems side by side at first: one made by John Logie Baird with spinning mechanical disks, and another by a company called EMI using all-electronic cameras. Engineers flipped between them week by week to see which was better. By February 1937 the electronic system had clearly won, and Baird's clunky discs were retired. The signal only reached about 25 miles around London, so people in Manchester or Glasgow had no idea any of this was happening.
World War II shut the whole thing down in 1939 - the government worried German bombers might use the broadcast signal to navigate to London. When TV came back in 1946, it picked up right where it left off, even rebroadcasting the same Mickey Mouse cartoon. That tiny November afternoon set the pattern for almost everything that followed: news, soap operas, cooking shows, sports, cartoons. Pretty much every screen in your home traces back to a singer on a hill in 1936.
