Vladimir Kosma Zworykin (1888/1889 – July 29, 1982) was a Russian-American inventor, engineer, and someone who helped start television technology. Zworykin created a television system that sent and received images using special tubes called cathode-ray tubes. He helped make television work better starting in the early 1930s, including developing types of tubes that stored electric charges, tubes that worked with invisible light, and a tool called an electron microscope.
Early life and education
Vladimir Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, in 1888 or 1889, to the family of a wealthy merchant. He had a peaceful childhood and saw his father only during religious holidays.
He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology with Boris Rosing. He helped Rosing with experiments related to television in the basement of Rosing's private lab at the School of Artillery in Saint Petersburg. They worked on the problem of "electrical telescopy," a concept he had never heard of before. At this time, electrical telescopy (or television, as it was later called) was just a dream. Zworykin did not know that others had been researching this idea since the 1880s, or that Professor Rosing had been working on it secretly since 1902 and had made significant progress. Rosing filed a patent for a television system in 1907, which included a very early cathode-ray tube as a receiver and a mechanical device as a transmitter. A demonstration of this system in 1911, using an improved design, was the first public demonstration of television.
Zworykin married Tatiana Vasilieva in 1916. They had two daughters. The couple separated in the early 1930s.
Career
Zworykin graduated in 1912. He then studied X-rays with Professor Paul Langevin in Paris. During World War I, Zworykin was enlisted and served in the Russian Signal Corps. He worked testing radio equipment produced for the Russian Army. Zworykin left Russia for the United States in 1918 during the Russian Civil War. He traveled through Siberia, going north along the River Ob to the Arctic Ocean as part of an expedition led by Russian scientist Innokenty P. Tolmachev, and arrived in the U.S. by the end of 1918. He returned to Omsk, the capital of Admiral Kolchak’s government, in 1919 via Vladivostok, then went back to the United States on official duties from the Omsk government. These duties ended when the White movement in Siberia collapsed after Kolchak’s death. Zworykin decided to stay permanently in the United States.
Once in the U.S., Zworykin worked at the Westinghouse laboratories in Pittsburgh, where he later had the chance to experiment with television.
Zworykin applied for a television patent in the U.S. in 1923. He summarized his invention in two patent applications. The first, called "Television Systems," was filed on December 29, 1923. A second application was filed in 1925 with minor changes and the addition of a Paget-type RGB raster screen for color transmission and reception. He was awarded a patent for the 1925 application in 1928 and two patents for the 1923 application in 1931, although the equipment described was never successfully demonstrated. Zworykin described cathode-ray tubes as both transmitter and receiver. The operation, which aimed to prevent electron emission between scanning cycles, was similar to a proposal by A. A. Campbell Swinton published in Nature in June 1908.
Zworykin’s demonstration (sometime in late 1925 or early 1926) was not successful with Westinghouse management, even though it showed the potential of a system using cathode-ray tubes. He was told to focus on more practical tasks but continued improving his system.
His doctoral dissertation from 1926, which earned him a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, focused on improving photoelectric cell output. However, there were limits to how much progress could be made in this area, so in 1929, Zworykin returned to vibrating mirrors and facsimile transmission, filing patents describing these. At the same time, he experimented with an improved cathode-ray receiving tube, filing a patent application in November 1929 and introducing the new receiver, which he called the "kinescope," at a convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers two days later.
By December, Zworykin had developed a prototype of the receiver and met David Sarnoff, who later hired him and placed him in charge of television development for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) at its factories and laboratories in Camden, New Jersey.
Zworykin moved to RCA’s Camden laboratories in the spring of 1930, and work on developing a transmitter began. An in-house evaluation in mid-1930 showed the kinescope performed well (but with only 60 lines of definition), while the transmitter was still mechanical. A major breakthrough came when Zworykin’s team decided to develop a new type of cathode-ray transmitter based on patents by Hungarian inventor Kálmán Tihanyi, whom RCA had contacted in July 1930. This design involved a scanning electron beam striking the photoelectric cell from the same side as the optical image. The system used a new principle: storing charges during the time between scans by the cathode-ray beam.
According to Albert Abramson, Zworykin’s experiments began in April 1931. After creating the first successful experimental transmitters in October 1931, the new camera tube was named the "iconoscope." Zworykin first presented the iconoscope to RCA in 1932. He continued improving it, and the "image iconoscope," introduced in 1934, was the result of a collaboration between Zworykin and RCA’s licensee Telefunken. In 1935, the Reichspost in Germany began public broadcasts using this tube with an 180-line system.
RCA filed a lawsuit against rival television scientist Philo Farnsworth, claiming Zworykin’s 1923 patent had priority over Farnsworth’s design, even though RCA could not prove Zworykin had built a working transmitter tube before 1931. Farnsworth had previously lost two interference claims to Zworykin in 1928, but in 1934, the U.S. Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth, awarding him priority for inventing the image dissector. RCA lost an appeal but continued legal battles for years. Eventually, Sarnoff agreed to pay Farnsworth royalties. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application. He also divided his original application in 1931, receiving a patent in 1935. A second patent was issued in 1938 by the Court of Appeals in a case unrelated to Farnsworth, despite the Patent Office’s objections.
i) Session 3: Dr. LF Broadway.
ii) Opening address by Sir James Redmond quoting LF Broadway. The group, which also included David Sarnoff, Simeon Aisenstein, and Isaac Shoenberg, knew each other from Russia and saw possible military uses for their television work. The group raised one million pounds sterling (about $5 million at the time) from U.S. donors. The work took place at EMI-Marconi in the U.K. and helped Britain become a leader in television development, allowing the country to launch a public service on November 2, 1936. Military applications also advanced radio-location technology, later called radar. The production of television equipment and sets helped improve related military technologies, such as cathode-ray tubes, VHF transmission and reception, and wideband circuits. A former British defense minister, Lord Orr-Ewing, mentioned this work in a 1979 BBC interview, saying, “That’s how we won the Battle of Britain.”
Later life
Zworykin entered into his second marriage in 1951. His wife was Katherine Polevitzky (1888–1985), a professor of bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania who was born in Russia. This was the second marriage for both individuals. The ceremony took place in Burlington, New Jersey. A collection of photos from his marriage and worldwide tour is available online. He retired in 1954.
New areas of study in medical engineering and biological engineering interested him. He became a founder and first president of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering. The Federation continues to recognize outstanding research in engineering through the Zworykin Award. The prize includes travel funds to attend the award’s presentation at a World Congress.
Death
Zworykin died on July 29, 1982, in Princeton, New Jersey. His wife, Katherine, died on February 18, 1985.
Honors
Throughout his career, Zworykin stayed actively involved in important projects at RCA and received many honors. In 1934, he was given the Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize by the Institute of Radio Engineers. In 1941, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1947, he received the Howard N. Potts Medal from The Franklin Institute. In 1948, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1954, he was named honorary vice president of RCA. In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member, gave him the National Medal of Science for his work in science, engineering, and television, as well as for helping apply engineering to medicine. In 1967, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. He was the founder-president of the International Federation for Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering, won the Faraday Medal from Great Britain in 1965, and was inducted into the U.S. National Hall of Fame in 1977. In 1980, he received the first Eduard Rhein Ring of Honor from the German Eduard Rhein Foundation. From 1952 to 1986, the IEEE gave awards to engineers in his name. More recently, the Zworykin Award has been presented by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering. A full list of Zworykin's awards can be found online at historyTV.net.
Legacy
Zworykin was honored in the New Jersey Inventor's Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In addition, Tektronix, a company in Beaverton, Oregon, named a street on its campus after Zworykin.
In 1995, the University of Illinois Press released a book titled Zworykin, Pioneer of Television by Albert Abramson.
In 2010, Leonid Parfyonov created a documentary film called Zvorykin-Muromets about Zworykin.
Zworykin is listed in the Russian-American Chamber of Fame, which is part of the Congress of Russian Americans. This group recognizes Russian immigrants who made significant contributions to American science or culture.