We watch it everyday. We use it to catch up on the news, follow our favorite sports teams, laugh and cry at shows and movies. We use it for entertainment, information, and even enlightenment. And we often completely take it for granted. Did you ever wonder, how does it work? Where did it come from? How has this miracle we know as TV evolved?

We've asked that, too. In fact, we asked some of the foremost authorities on the subject, TV historian and author Walter J. Podrazik (www.watchingtv.org), the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago (www.museum.tv), and electronics journalist Rebecca Day, a frequent contributor to Electronic House and electronichouse.com. They have been kind enough to share their vast knowledge so that we may chronicle TV from its roots in radio to its future who knows where. Along the way, we see how TV content has evolved, how television has changed the way we get our information and how we view of the world, it's role in seminal events like the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War and Watergate hearings, and how the acceleration of technology in the last few decades has led to the many new forms of high-definition television we enjoy today.

Who would have thought, as a family from the Fifties gathered around a tiny black-and-white screen, that one day we would be hanging flat-panel TVs on the wall. Actually, someone in the 1970s did envision it! That's just one of the many surprises in this TV timeline. View on: We bet you'll be surprised, too.