John Logie Baird in the context of "Mechanical television"

Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electrical or electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of transmission may be divided into communication channels for multiplexing, allowing for a single medium to transmit several concurrent communication sessions. Long-distance technologies invented during the 20th and 21st centuries generally use electric power, and include the electrical telegraph, telephone, television, and radio.

Early telecommunication networks used metal wires as the medium for transmitting signals. These networks were used for telegraphy and telephony for many decades. In the first decade of the 20th century, a revolution in wireless communication began with breakthroughs including those made in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other early pioneers in electrical and electronic telecommunications include co-inventors of the telegraph Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse, numerous inventors and developers of the telephone including Antonio Meucci, Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, inventors of radio Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest, as well as inventors of television like Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth.

Color television (American English) or colour television (British English) is a television transmission technology that also includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white television technology, which displays the image in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world transitioned from black-and-white to color broadcasting between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards was an important part of the history and technology of television.

Transmission of color images using mechanical scanners had been conceived as early as the 1880s. A demonstration of mechanically scanned color television was given by John Logie Baird in 1928, but its limitations were apparent even then. Development of electronic scanning and display made a practical system possible. Monochrome transmission standards were developed prior to World War II, but civilian electronics development was frozen during much of the war. In August 1944, Baird gave the world's first demonstration of a practical fully electronic color television display. In the United States, competing color standards were developed, finally resulting in the NTSC color standard that was compatible with the prior monochrome system. Although the NTSC color standard was proclaimed in 1953, and limited programming soon became available, it was not until the early 1970s that color television in North America outsold black-and-white units. Color broadcasting in Europe did not standardize on the PAL or SECAM formats until the 1960s.

The Crystal Palace transmitting station, officially known as Arqiva Crystal Palace, is a broadcasting and telecommunications site in the Crystal Palace area of the London Borough of Bromley, England (grid reference TQ339712). It is located on the site of the former television station and transmitter operated by John Logie Baird from 1933.

The station is the eighth-tallest structure in London, and is best known as the main television transmitter for the Greater London area and parts of the surrounding Home Counties. As such, it is the most important transmitter in the UK in terms of population covered. The transmitter is owned and operated by Arqiva. Given the transmitter's location on top of a 109-metre (358 ft) hill, it is the highest structure above sea level in London.