INVENTOR'S HALL OF FAME
Patent No.
2,139,296
Inventor Vladimir Zworykin, a naturalized American citizen, was born in Murom, Russia near Moscow in 1889. At age nine, he began spending his summers as an apprentice aboard the boats his father operated on the Oka River. He eagerly helped repair electrical equipment and it soon became apparent that he was more interested in electricity than anything nautical.
As a student in the Imperial Institute of Technology, Zworykin struck up a friendship with Boris Rosing, a professor in charge of laboratory projects. The young man was soon working on some of Rosing's private projects, one of which was an attempt to transmit pictures by wire. The pair experimented with a primitive cathode-ray tube, developed in Germany by Karl Ferdinand Braun. In 1910, Rosing exhibited a television system, using a mechanical scanner in the transmitter and the electronic Braun tube in the receiver.
The lure of theoretededitorical physics drew Zworykin to Paris after he graduated with honors and a scholarship in electrical engineering in 1912. Arriving in the United States in 1919, he soon joined the Westinghouse laboratory staff in Pittsburgh.
On November 18, 1929, at a convention of radio engineers, Zworykin demonstrated a television receiver containing his "kinescope," a cathode-ray tube with the principal features of all modern picture tubes. That same year, Dr. Zworykin joined the Radio Corporation of America in Camden, New Jersey. As the director of their Electronic Research Laboratory, he was able to concentrate on making critical improvements to his system.
Zworykin's "storage principle" eventually became the basis of modern television.
The above information was supplied by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, Inc., Room 1D01-Crystal Plaza 3, 2021 Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, Virginia 22202. Videotapes and printed materials are currently available. For more information, visit the Foundation's web site at http://www.invent.org
