John Logie Baird is only one claimant to this title. In fact, on the Internet he's not even a favorite. Wikipedia – normally a sucker for nicknames – doesn't even mention it in respect of him.
According to The UnMuseum, Vladimir K. Zworykin, Paul Nipkow, Charles Francis Jenkins and Philo T. Farnsworth (as well as Baird) "all have a claim" to be called the Father of Television.
Granted, the UnMuseum might not be the first authority you'd turn to in order to settle an argument. But it was the first hit in my Google search (for "father of television").
Wikipedia's first nomination on my hit list was Philo T. Farnsworth. Wikipedia refers to an obituary in the Deseret News, whose headline reads "Philo T. Farnsworth Dies At 64, Known As Father Of Television". (The Deseret News is published in Salt Lake City, Utah – Farnsworth's adopted home town. The name Deseret is a reference to the Book of Mormon, in which it means a honeybee.)
According to Wikipedia, Farnsworth "is best known for his 1927 invention of the first fully functional all–electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), the image dissector, as well as the first fully functional and complete all–electronic television system."
Vladimir K. Zworykin's contributions included charge storage–type tubes, infra–red image tubes and the electron microscope. And Paul Nipkow was a German student who proposed and patented the first (electromechanical) TV system in 1884. He never built a working model, but Baird's first apparatus, built in 1918, was based on Nipkow's theory.
Charles Francis Jenkins, according to Wikipedia, "publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of pictures and sound". But "his mechanical technologies (also pioneered by John Logie Baird) were later overtaken by electronic television such as devised by Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth."
All of which goes to show that television had many fathers. No one person invented television, and no one is universally recognised as its father.
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