Invention Of CD / DVD

The video disc was invented by John Logie Baird as early as 1926, but the idea did not become a commercial success until 1996 with the introduction of the digital versatile disc (DVD), a development of the earlier compact disc (CD).

The inventor of television was also the inventor of the first video recorder. In 1926 John Logie Baird (Scotland) was granted a patent for a device that recorded visual images on a 25cm wax disc, using the same principle as the Gramophone. The idea of recording visual images on disc was reinvented 46 years later by Philips Electronics (Netherland) as Philips Laservision, which they demonstrated in 1972 and launched in the US in 1980 and in Europe in 1982 - the same year as the commercial launch of the CD, which had been developed by Philips in conjunction with Sony (Japan).

Both the CD and the laser-read video disc originated from the invention of an optical disc by James T. Russell (USA). Russell was frustrated by the wear and tear of styli on vinyl records and, in 1965, patented the idea of storing information on a disc to be read optically by a laser. Philips developed Russell's concept to store video images, and from 1969 Klaas Compaan and Piet Kramer (both Netherlands) developed the Video Long Player: a 300mm video disc that was first demonstrated in 1972 and eventually launched in 1980 as Laservision. Meanwhile, from 1975 Philips' engineer Lou Ottens (Netherlands), director of Audio R&D, assigned a team to study the possibilities of Hifi-Audio on a small optical disc. After joint development with Sony, the invention was launched in 1982 as the now-familiar 120mm compact disc, the use of which has since spread from music to computers, in the form of the CD-ROM.

Baird's disc and Philips' Laservision had been ahead of their time: the idea was right, but the product was impractical. However, advances in disc and laser technology in the 1990's led to the development by Philips, Sony, Matsushita (Japan) and Toshiba (Japan) of the Digital Versatile Disc. DVD could store a vast amount of information on a disc the same size as a CD - easily enough information for a feature film, which meant that DVD almost immediately superseded videotapes as the medium of choice for recording visual images.


Source - The Book Of Inventions by Ian Harrison