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& Answers
14
DECEMBER 2017
questions
& Answers
W H O R E A L LY I N V E N T E D ?
TELEVISION
WHY ARE
the most famous being the Scottish inventor John
Logie Baird. In January 1926 he gave the first-ever
demonstration of the transmission of moving images,
and, by 1929, Baird was selling ‘Televisor’ sets for £25 –
MOST PEOPLE
RIGHT
equivalent to £1,500 today. Baird’s design offered small,
flickering, black-and-white images and involved the use
of a spinning, perforated disk invented in 1894 by
German engineer Paul Nipkow that scanned images
for transmission as electrical signals.
-HANDED?
The technology needed to give television its mass
appeal is generally credited to the brilliant American
inventor Philo Farnsworth. While still a teenager, he
realised that emerging electronic technology could scan
images far faster and more finely than any mechanical Many animals show a preference for one side of the body over
device, and, in 1927, he demonstrated the first electronic another, but the split between right- and left-handed varies. Seven
television. A bitter patent dispute with the US electronics out of 10 chimpanzees are right-handed, but almost all kangaroos
company RCA then broke out. Despite ultimately are left-handed. In cats, males are nearly all left-handed and
winning and being awarded a settlement plus royalties, females are nearly all right-handed. Humans have a higher
Farnsworth and his key role in the invention of television proportion of right-handers than any species, with left-handers
PHOTOS: GETTY X3, ALAMY X2, ANDREI REINOL
are now largely forgotten. RM making up just 10 per cent of the population. This is because we are
Post-war German a tool-using species, and also highly social. The very earliest flint
television tools, around two million years ago, don’t show a strong bias
towards left- or right-handed versions. But it’s a big advantage if you
can use the tools someone else has made, and, from about 1.5
million years ago, we seem to have standardised on the right-
handed versions. It’s not exactly clear why right-handedness won,
but it may be that one side of our brain was already specialised
for fine-motor control. One theory why left-handedness hasn’t been
completely eliminated is that it provides an advantage in combat,
precisely because it is rarer, and, therefore, unexpected. You can
see this today in sports like tennis, where left-handed professionals
16 are more common than in the general population. LV
DECEMBER 2017