Google
 

Monday, February 25, 2008

Who invented television?


Who invented television?

So many inventors participated in the development of TV that it is impossible to give one individual credit for its invention. A few people, however, can be recognized as pioneers in this field.

Paul Nipkow proposed the first practical mechanical scanner in Germany in 1884. The scanner was a rotating disk with holes arranged in a spiral around its edge. Light passing through the holes, as the disk rotated, produced a rectangular scanning pattern or raster which could be used to either generate an electrical signal from the scene for transmitting or to produce an image from the signal at the receiver.

John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer-inventor, successfully promoted a television system based on the Nipkrow principle. He then sold transmitters and receivers.

In 1927, an American, Philo Farnsworth, widely recognized as the inventor of electronic television, was the first inventor to transmit a television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. The image transmitted was a dollar sign. Farnsworth developed the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions. He filed for his first television patent in 1927.

Vladimir Kosmas Zworykin, a Russian-born American inventor working for Westinghouse, is also credited as being the father of modern television. This was because the patent for the heart of the TV, the electron scanning tube was first applied for by Zworykin in 1923, under the name of an iconoscope. The iconoscope was an electronic image scanner-essentially a primitive television camera. However, while Zworykin applied for the patent for his iconoscope in 1923, the invention was not functional until some years later and all earlier efforts were of such poor quality that Westinghouse officials ordered him to work on something more useful! In Britain, the Electric and Musical Industries, Ltd. provided a system along with Baird’s and, these were experimentally used to broadcast television programs by BBC in November 1936.

No comments: