Vladimir K. Zworykin, Television Pioneer

Владимир Козьмич Зворыкин - Vladimir Koz'mich Zvorykin) (July 29 1888 – July 29, 1982) was a Russian-American inventor, engineer, and pioneer of television technology. Zworykin invented a television transmitting and receiving system. He played a role in the practical development of television from the early thirties.

Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, in 1888, to the family of a prosperous merchant. He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, under Boris Rosing. He helped Boris Rosing with experimental work on television in the basement of Rosing's private lab at the School of Artillery of Saint Petersburg. They worked on the problem of "electrical telescopy," something Zworykin had never heard of before. At this time, electrical telescopy (or television as it was later called) was just a dream. V. Zworykin graduated in 1912 and studied X-rays under professor Paul Langevin in Paris. During World War I, Zworykin was enlisted and served in the Russian Army. Zworykin decided to leave Russia for the United States in 1918, during the Russian Civil War. He left through Siberia, travelling north on the River Ob to the Arctic Ocean as part of an expedition led by Russian scientist Innokenty P. Tolmachev, eventually arriving in the US at the end of 1918. He returned to Omsk, then capital of Admiral Kolchak's government in 1919, via Vladivostok, then to the United States again on official duties from the Omsk government. These duties ended with the collapse of the White movement in Siberia at the death of Kolchak. V. Zworykin decided, this time, to remain permanently in the US. Once in the U.S., V.Zworykin found work in Pittsburgh, where he eventually had an opportunity to engage in television experiments. He summarized the resulting invention in two patent applications. Vladimir Zworykin described cathode ray tubes as both transmitter and receiver. The demonstration given by V. Zworykin in late 1925 or early 1926, was far from a success but Zworykin continued his efforts to perfect his system. Having developed the prototype of the receiver by December 1929, Zworykin met David Sarnoff, who eventually hired him and put him in charge of television development for RCA ( the Radio Corporation of America) 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. There was an in-house evaluation in mid-1930, where the kinescope performed well (but with only 60 lines definition), and the transmitter was still of a mechanical type. A "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. This was a curious design, one where the scanning electron beam would strike the photoelectric cell from the same side where the optical image was cast. Even more importantly, it was a system characterized by an operation based on an entirely new principle, the principle of the accumulation and storage of charges during the entire time between two scansions by the cathode-ray beam. It was decided that the new camera tube would be named Iconoscope. The system was ready to be launched at the end of 1934, a contract had of course been signed with the Hungarian inventor for the purchase of his patents. In early 1935, the new tube was introduced in Germany. It was soon developed there, with some improvements, and was successfully used at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Hall of Fame; and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Monument to Zvorykin at the Ostankino tower in Moscow Death He died on July 29, 1982 in Princeton, New Jersey. Legacy He was inducted into the New Jersey Inventor's  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 his children watching television. "The switch. The switch to turn the damn thing off." - Vladimir Zworykin on his favourite thing on television. Sources: 1. Virginia Evans, Jenny Dooley, Bob Obee, Olga Afanasyeva, Irina Mikheeva. Spotlight 10, Student Book. M., Express Publishing, “Просвещение” 2013 Module 8, Culture Corner, page 151 The Best of British Inventions 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin https://archive.org/details/Story_of_Television_The 3. В.П.Борисов. Зворыкин. Молодая гвардия, Серия: Жизнь замечательных людей. 2013. 4. Video - http://vivovoco.astronet.ru/VV/PAPERS/ECCE/ZVORIKIN.HTM