The TV's that people used back in the good old days are far different in technology than what we are familiar with in modern times. They operated in different ways and the ways in which shows were broadcasted to these televisions is very different to what we are used to now
The first ideas about a possible device that could send images to people in different places came about in the late 1800s, with discoveries by Willoughby Smith, Paul Gottlieb Nipkow and John Logie Baird in 1926.
Willoughby Smith the sole person who managed to find out about the photo-conductivity of the element selenium, which in turn created photoelectric cells which were found in the earliest television systems! (shown on the right).
The next person to revolutionise the ways in which TV's would come about was a man called Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. Nipkow was the man who invented the scanning disk, which was basically a device that would scan images on to a screen via the use of small holes. this was key in 1920's television sets despite being patented in 1884.
John Baird managed to present the first demonstration of televised moving images in the year 1926. John Baird was the first person to actually manage to get a motion image on to a screen. due to this being successful, the production of TV's began.
at the young age of 23 Nipkow put forward the first model of an electromechanical television system. Nipkow did this in the year 1884.
In 1907, Lee de Forest and Arthur Korn made developments in tube amplification technology, which resulted in a more practical design to the original design proposed by Nipkow
the immediate transmission of images was firstly attempted and demonstrated by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in the year 1909 in France's capital city Paris. They used 64 selenium cells which were each wired separately to something called a mechanical commutator which served as a mechanical Retina. The receiver had these Kerr cells which would shine the light onto mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disk, thus projecting an image onto a display screen.
1911 saw the next step in TV, the invention of a television system that uses a mechanical mirror drum scanner to send images over wires to what was called the 'Braun tube' (Cathode ray tube or CRT for short), this didnt prove to work for reasons such as the selenium cell being very slow or laggy.
Here is an image of a standard black and white TV set from the 1950s.
This was the sort of thing TV set that households had in their homes.
Much much smaller than the TVs of today, they received terrestrial broadcasts in black and white colour scale.