Physicist, born in Murom, W Russia. He studied at the St Petersburg Institute of Technology and the Collège de France in Paris, emigrated to the USA in 1919, and became a US citizen in 1924. He joined the Radio Corporation (1929), becoming director of electronic research (1946) and vice-president (1947). In 19234 he patented an all-electronic television system using a scanned camera-tube (the iconoscope), in 1929 demonstrated a cathode-ray display (the kinescope), and in later years contributed to the development of colour television and the electron microscope. He is regarded as the father of modern television.
Vladimir Kosma Zworykin (Russian: Владимир Козьмич Зворыкин) (July 30, 1889 - July 29, 1982) was a pioneer of television technology. Zworykin invented a television transmitting and receiving system employing cathode ray tubes. He was instrumental in the practical development of television from the early thirties, including charge storage-type tubes, infrared image tubes and the electron microscope.
Biography
Born in Murom, Russia in 1889 and perhaps on July 30, he studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, under Boris Rosing. According to recently discovered personal correspondence of Zworykin, he helped Boris Rosing with experimental work on television in the basement of Rosing's private lab at the School of Artillery of St. Petersburg. Rosing had filed his first patent on a television system in 1907, featuring a very early cathode ray tube as a receiver and a mechanical device as a transmitter.
Although most biographies maintain that Zworykin graduated in 1912 and, thereafter, studied X-rays under Professor Paul Langevin in Paris, in the above referenced correspondence Zworykin gives the dates of having studied with Rosing between 1910 and 1914. Be that as it may, During World War I, Zworykin was enlisted and served in the Russian Signal Corps, then succeeded in getting a job working for Russian Marconi, testing radio equipment that was being produced for the Russian Army.
Once in the U.S., Zworykin found work at the Westinghouse laboratories in Pittsburgh, where he would eventually get an opportunity to engage in television experiments.
Although, as we know, Zworykin described cathode ray tubes as both transmitter and receiver, the operation, whose basic thrust was to prevent the emission of electrons between scansion cycles--a solution reminiscent of A.A.
The demonstration given by Zworykin sometime late 1925, early 1926 (not in 1923, as popular accounts would have it) was far from a success with the Westinghouse management, even though it showed the possibilities inherent in a system based on the Braun tube. Although he was told by management to "devote his time to more practical endeavours," Zworykin continued his efforts to perfect his system.
There were, however, limits of how far one could go along these lines, and so, in 1929, Zworykin returned to vibrating mirrors and facsimile transmission, filing patents describing these. At this time, however, he was also experimenting with an improved cathode ray receiving tube, filing a patent application for this in November 1929, and introducing the new receiver he named Kinescope, reading a paper two days later at a convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers.
Having developed the prototype of the receiver by December, Zworykin met David Sarnoff, who eventually hired him and put him in charge of television development for RCA at their newly established laboratories in Camden, New Jersey.
The move to the laboratories occurred in the spring of 1930 and the difficult task of developing a transmitter could begin. The breakthrough would come when the Zworykin team decided to develop a new type of cathode ray transmitter, one described in the French and British patents of 1928 priority by the Hungarian inventor Kalman Tihanyi whom the company had approached in July 1930, after the publication of his patents in England and France.
According to Albert Abramson, these experiments started in April 1931, and after the achievement of the first promising experimental transmitters, on October 23, 1931, it was decided: the new camera tube would be named Iconoscope.
Although the tube went through a number of adjustments and improvements, it continued to be called by the generic name of Iconoscope.
The developments in England, by the British firm Marconi/EMI, followed the original charge storage design under a patent exchange.
Zworykin retired in 1954.
Legacy
He was inducted into the New Jersey Inventor's Hall of Fame;
Quote
"I hate what they've done to my child...I would never let my own children watch it."
- Vladimir Zworykin on his feelings about watching television.
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