---
title: "Which came first, photography or television?"
description: "photography vs television: photography came first, by 99 years — 1826 against 1925. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/photograph-vs-television/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, photography or television?

**Which came first, photography or television?: photography**

1826 — 99 years before television

photography came first, by 99 years. Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature.

## Side by side

|  | photography | television |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1826 | 1925 |
| Date | — | 1925-10-02 |
| Category | invention | invention |
| What happened | Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature. | Baird transmitted the first moving greyscale image. |

## photography

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, made around 1826 or 1827 on a pewter plate coated in bitumen, required an exposure of at least eight hours. Daguerre's process of 1839 cut that to minutes and made photography practical. Photography therefore predates the telephone by half a century and the fax machine by seventeen years.

## television

John Logie Baird transmitted a recognisable moving image of a ventriloquist's dummy in October 1925 using a mechanical spinning-disc system. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated fully electronic television in 1927, and it was that approach, not Baird's, that every subsequent television used. Regular public broadcasting began in 1936, which means television is younger than the talking film and older than the ballpoint pen.

## Common questions

### Which came first, photography or television?

photography, by 99 years — 1826 against 1925.

### When did photography start?

1826. Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature.

### When did television start?

1925. Baird transmitted the first moving greyscale image.

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## Sources

- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)