Vladimir Zworykin

Vladimir Zworykin (born July 29 [July 17, Old Style], 1888, Murom, Russia—died July 29, 1982, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.) was a Russian-born American electronic engineer and the inventor of the iconoscope and kinescope television systems.

Zworykin studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, where from 1910 to 1912 he assisted physicist Boris Rosing in his experiments with a television system that consisted of a rotating mirror drum to scan an image and a cathode-ray tube to display it. He then studied at the Collège de France, in Paris and served during World War I in the Russian Signal Corps. He emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a naturalized citizen in 1924. In 1920 he joined the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh, but he left after a year to work in Kansas City for C&C Development Company, which had a patent for using high-frequency currents in oil refining. Zworykin was hired to test the invention but found that it was useless.

Zworykin returned to Westinghouse in 1923, and that year he filed a patent for an all-electronic television system, which had cathode-ray tubes for both transmitting and receiving images. (Other television systems such as that of Rosing relied on mechanical devices such as spinning disks and mirrored drums to capture and reproduce an image.) In 1924 he began building a television system based (with modifications to the camera tube) on his patent, and in 1925 he demonstrated an almost entirely electronic system for several Westinghouse executives, who were not impressed.

Westinghouse reassigned Zworykin to work on photoelectric cells. In late 1928 he was sent to Europe to examine television research being done in partnership with Westinghouse and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). He was particularly impressed by the cathode-ray tube designed by Fernand Holweck and Pierre Chevallier at the Paris laboratory of French inventor Édouard Belin. The Holweck-Chevallier tube used electrostatic fields to focus the beam of electrons. Zworykin’s reenergized enthusiasm for the new tube and electronic television was not shared by most Westinghouse executives, but vice president Sam Kintner suggested that he meet with RCA vice president David Sarnoff. At their meeting in January 1929 Sarnoff asked Zworykin how much it would take to bring electronic television to market. Zworykin said two years and $100,000 (as it turned out, a gross underestimate), and Sarnoff persuaded Westinghouse to give Zworykin the necessary resources. By the end of the year, he had perfected his cathode-ray receiver, the kinescope, which had a picture large enough and bright enough for home viewing; however, his television system still used a mechanical device, a spinning mirror, as part of the transmission apparatus. Six kinescopes were built; Zworykin had one at his home, where late at night it received experimental television signals from Westinghouse’s radio station, KDKA, in Pittsburgh. In 1930 Westinghouse’s television research was transferred to RCA, and Zworykin became head of the television division at RCA’s Camden, New Jersey, laboratory.

In April 1930 Zworykin visited the San Francisco laboratory of inventor Philo Farnsworth at the behest of Farnsworth’s backers, who wanted to make a deal with RCA. Three years earlier Farnsworth had done the first successful demonstration of an entirely electronic television system. Zworykin was particularly impressed by Farnsworth’s transmission tube, the image dissector, and was inspired by its innovations to develop an improved camera tube, the iconoscope, for which he filed a patent in 1931. RCA kept Zworykin’s developments a secret, and only in 1933 was Zworykin able to announce the existence of the iconoscope. In 1939 RCA introduced regular electronic television broadcasting at the New York World’s Fair.

Zworykin’s other developments in electronics included innovations in the electron microscope. His electron image tube, sensitive to infrared light, was the basis for the sniperscope and snooperscope, devices first used in World War II for seeing in the dark. His secondary-emission multiplier was used in the scintillation counter. In later life Zworykin lamented the way that television had been abused to titillate and trivialize subjects rather than for the educational and cultural enrichment of audiences.

Named an honorary vice president of RCA in 1954, from then until 1962 Zworykin also served as director of the medical electronics centre of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City. In 1966 the National Academy of Sciences awarded him the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the instruments of science, engineering, and television and for his stimulation of the application of engineering to medicine. He was also founder-president of the International Federation for Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering, a recipient of the Faraday Medal from Great Britain (1965), and a member of the U.S. National Hall of Fame from 1977.

Zworykin wrote Photocells and Their Application (1934; with E.D. Wilson), Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940; with G.A. Morton), Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope (1945; with G.A. Morton, E.G. Ramberg, J. Hillier, and A.W. Vance), Photoelectricity and Its Application (1949; with E.G. Ramberg), and Television in Science and Industry (1958; with E.G. Ramberg and L.E. Flory).