Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow was a German electrical engineer and inventor. He created the Nipkow disk, which helped start television because it was a key part of the first televisions. Many stations tested television broadcasting with his disk in the 1920s and 1930s until newer systems replaced it in the 1940s.

Nipkow is known as the "father of television," along with other early television pioneers like Karl Ferdinand Braun. The first regular television service in the world, Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, was named after him.

Beginnings

Nipkow was born in Lauenburg (now Lębork), which was part of the Prussian province of Pomerania, now located in Poland. While attending school in nearby Neustadt (now Wejherowo), in the province of West Prussia, Nipkow explored topics such as telephone technology and the movement of images. After finishing school, he moved to Berlin to study science. There, he studied physiological optics with Hermann von Helmholtz and electro-physics with Adolf Slaby.

Nipkow disk

While he was still a student, he had the idea for an "electric telescope," which is best known for using a spiral-perforated disk called the Nipkow disk to break an image into a series of points. Stories about the invention say he got the idea while sitting alone at home with an oil lamp on Christmas Eve in 1883. Earlier, in the 1840s, Alexander Bain had sent images through telegraph, but the Nipkow disk made the process of encoding images more efficient.

He asked the imperial patent office in Berlin to grant a patent for an "electric telescope" used to "electrically reproduce illuminated objects," in the category of "electric devices." The patent was approved on January 15, 1885, but it was dated back to January 6, 1884. There is no record that Nipkow ever built a working model of the disk. The patent expired after 15 years because no one showed interest in it. Nipkow later became a designer at an institute in Berlin-Buchloh and did not continue working on sending pictures over the air.

First TV systems

The first television broadcasts used a method that combined light and moving parts, a technique that Paul Nipkow helped develop with his disk. He could take credit for the invention. Nipkow described seeing television for the first time at a Berlin radio show in 1928: "The televisions were placed in dark rooms. Many people stood waiting to see television for the first time. I waited with them, feeling nervous. Finally, I reached the front row. A dark cloth was moved aside, and I saw a shaky image that was hard to see clearly." The system shown at the event belonged to the company Telefunken.

Beginning in the early 1930s, a new method of scanning images using electricity, based on the work of Manfred von Ardenne, became more common. Because of this, Nipkow's earlier invention was no longer needed for the continued progress of television.

"Paul Nipkow" Transmitter

The world's first regular television service began in Berlin in 1935. It was named Fernsehsender "Paul Nipkow" after Paul Nipkow, who is known as the "spiritual father" of the main part of early television technology. Nipkow became an honorary president of the "television council" of the "Imperial Broadcasting Chamber." Hitler and the Nazi government used Nipkow's name to support their scientific propaganda efforts. Nipkow died in Berlin in 1940, two days after his 80th birthday. The Nazi government arranged an official ceremony to honor him.