In our fast-moving age, very few people are aware that Bosch played a significant role in the successful rise of television in Germany. Not only that: the principle on which television is based is older than many would believe. As early as 1884, the German engineer Paul Nipkow developed an electronic image scanner which allowed images of objects to be transmitted electrically. For this purpose, Nipkow used a disk - later to be named after him - with regularly spaced holes arranged in a spiral around its edge. This Nipkow disk rotates between the object to be depicted and a photoelectric selenium cell. In sequence, the image of one specific part of the object passes to the selenium cell through these holes. The cell modulates an electric current, which feeds a light bulb at the receiving end. The light from the lamp, which varies in intensity, passes through the holes of a synchronously rotating second Nipkow disk onto a screen, where an image of the object again appears.

At first, nobody knew what this invention was good for. Forty years later, the Scotsman John Logie Baird then began experimenting with a Nipkow disk. In 1925/26, he finally succeeded in transmitting the image of a face. And in 1928, when Baird successfully transmitted a television picture from London to New York by sea cable, industry began to show an interest in the invention. One of those to show an interest was Robert Bosch. On July 3, 1929, he and several partners, including Baird, founded "Fernseh AG" in Berlin, more usually known by its Bosch abbreviation "FESE". At first, however, the new company's success was extremely modest. After all, the Nipkow disk only allowed a slow succession of low-resolution images to be transmitted. Its 12½ 30-line-definition pictures per second were not enough for any practical use.

The first breakthrough came with a high-vacuum television picture tube, developed by FESE in 1933 in collaboration with the University of Hamburg. And when, in 1936, "dissector" tubes were developed, followed soon afterward by iconoscope cameras, nothing more stood in the way of fully electronic television. So it was, for example, that all the important events of the Berlin Olympics could be recorded using modern FESE cameras, processed in a central control room, and forwarded to VHF transmitters. Having said that, there were still hardly any television receivers in 1936. The German audience followed these "live broadcasts" in public TV rooms, but there were not many of those, either. In 1936, therefore, the majority of the populace still had to rely on the radio and cinema newscasts for their information.

By 1939, all of Bosch's partners has withdrawn from Fernseh AG, and the company's form was changed to a GmbH, similar to its parent company. And while the Second World War interrupted the development of German television and FESE, it was not able to stop either of them. At Christmas 1952, the Allies gave their permission for regular television broadcasts to start in Germany. FESE, now domiciled in Darmstadt, subsequently focused entirely on developing and manufacturing recording and studio equipment. It left the business of making television receivers to another Bosch subsidiary - Blaupunkt GmbH in Hildesheim. FESE's further development was initially a successful one. After all, the company supplied almost all the studio and transmission equipment for the 1972 Munich Olympics, and of course for the color television broadcasting that began in Germany in 1967.

But the beginning of the 1980s marked a turning point. Finally, in 1986, as a result of increasing competition from outside Germany, not least from the Far East, the company (known since 1972 as Robert Bosch Fernsehanlagen GmbH) was contributed to a joint venture with Philips. Later, Bosch was to withdraw entirely from this joint venture. This marked the end of almost six decades of television at Bosch.