A breif history of television

Most people think that the television was developed through years of painstaking reasearch. Well it wasn't: It was discovered by accident.

Alexander Flemming, while working with bacteria, left a sample of a particularly nasty disease over a weekend. When he came back he found that the sample had gone mouldy, and a curious glass object had grown from the centre. This was the first cathode-ray tube. In a fit of depression (because he hadn't discovered the cure for V.D.) he cast the unfortunate piece of glassware into a far corner.

The outcast tube wandered the streets, eventually turning to drink and drugs. But one day, by chance, he met a beautiful chest of drawers who changed his life. Eventually, they settled down together and lived happily ever after. Well almost, the drawers developed terminal dry rot and the tube blew it's own electrodes out.

MotherDuring his brief life the Cathode ray tube fathered a son by the chest of drawers. The first television set! Orphaned by the tragic loss of it's parents the TV set wandered the streets, until he was found in a bus shelter by Logi Baird. He took the set home and let it live in the corner of his sitting room. The TV was an immediate hit with Baird's children who sat watching it for hours. This gave Baird a wonderful idea: pictures could be transmitted, and then received by the television set. Every home could have one and TV sets would never have to walk the streets again! He immediately set about breeding the sets using radios as stud, to make the next generation of TVs capable of sound. So the TV revolution began.

After the initial breeding programme, the BBC was set up, followed by other channels. Soon it became a world wide obsession. And so we come to the point of this story. As with all resources the TV has been exploited. Many people are still ignorant of the suffering forced upon TVs world wide. A TV's life starts in a battery farm. Here thousands of TVs are kept just for breeding, in crowded, unhealthy condition. Most will die and be sold for scrap before their second birthday, after producing four to five litters. The young TV pups are sold to fattening warehouses where they are kept in skin tight packages stacked upon each other. They have only two breathing holes,through one of which they are fed a high protein slurry. Then they are transported to markets such as the Dixons, who are notorious for their maltreatment of domestic appliances. The lucky ones will be sold to good homes. Others could end up in homes with children, where they may have lollipops forced upon them or suffer death by orange juice. Still more are bought by owners who seem to think that when the TVs go wrong they should be thumped to repair them. The horror does not stop there! A proportion of the young TV sets are destined to become computer monitors. This necessitates a painful operation whereby they are neutered. . . without an anesthetic! So next time you are about to throw something at the TV, just think.

NEXT : Japanese sofa harpooning fleets - scientific research or pointless slaughter?

 

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