OTHER TELEVISON PIONEERS  updated November 2006

A.A. Campbell-Swinton in 1908 gave some of the first proposals in detail for an electronic TV system. His biography will be uploaded soon

John Logie Baird (1888 - 1946),was a close friend and colleague of Edgar Larner. JBL (Baird) was a brilliant an electrical engineer and inventor. He took over a large attic (2 rooms) at 22 frith St in the summer of 1924.  It was here that he conducted a series of experiments over the next year and a half that led to his demonstration of his "noctovision" to members of the Royal Institution, on the 27th  January  1926. This was the first public demonstration of this technology. Although others including Edgar Larner were also working on picture transmission, Baird was the first to succeed. His system used infrared rays to communicate pictures from a darkened room The Times newspaper reported on this major landmark in electrical engineering, as follows:

"Members of the Royal Institution and other visitors to a laboratory in an upper room in Frith-Street, Soho, on Tuesday [26 January] saw a demonstration of apparatus invented by Mr. J.L. Baird, who claims to have solved the problem of television. They were shown a transmitting machine, consisting of a large wooden revolving disc containing lenses, behind which was a revolving shutter and a light sensitive cell. It was explained that by means of the shutter and lens disc an image of articles or persons standing in front of the machine could be made to pass over the light sensitive cell at high speed. The current in the cell varies in proportion to the light falling on it, and this varying current is transmitted to a receiver where it controls a light behind an optical arrangement similar to that at the sending end. By this means a point of light is caused to traverse a ground glass screen. The light is dim at the shadows and bright at the high lights, and crosses the screen so rapidly that the whole image appears simultaneously to the eye. For the purposes of the demonstration the head of a ventriloquist’s doll was manipulated as the image to be transmitted, though the human face was also reproduced. First on a receiver in the same room as the transmitter and then on a portable receiver in another room, the visitors were shown recognizable reception of the movements of the dummy head and of a person speaking. The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the "Televisor" as Mr.Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face."


credit: The Times,Thursday 28 January 1926, p.9 column C, London, taken from The Times Archives


Charles F Jenkins; Another man who experimented with mechanical televsion in the early years was Charles Francis Jenkins, an American inventor. It was in May 1920, at the Toronto meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, that Jenkins presented his prismatic rings as a device to replace the shutter on a film projector. This invention was to be the foundation for his first radio-vision broadcast. Although he later claimed to have transmitted the earliest moving silhouette images in June, 1923, his first actual public demonstration of these did not take place until June of 1925.

Jenkins Laboratories later constructed a radio-vision transmitter, W3XK, in Washington D.C. This short-wave station began transmitting radio-movies across the Eastern U.S. on a regular basis in July, 1928. 

Incidentially in 1883/4, Paul Nipkow, a German television pioneer, invented the perforated spiral distributing disk or mechanical scanner. His electrical telescope was notable as the first successful method for scanning moving images. It remained in use through the late 1920s, but eventually it was replaced by electronic scanning in the 1930s. see below for more details

Paul Nipkow The German engineering student, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the world's first electromechanical television system in 1884. He devised the notion of dissecting an image and transmitting it sequentially. To do this he designed the first “television” scanning device. Nipkow was then the  first person to discover television's scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analysed and transmitted. In 1873 the photoconductive properties of the element selenium had been discovered, the main feature being that selenium's electrical conductivity varied with the amount of illumination it received. Nipkow created a rotating scanning disk camera called the Nipkow disk, which was a device for picture analysation that consisted of a rapidly rotating disk placed between a scene and a light sensitive selenium element. The image had only 18 lines of resolution. John Logie Baird used a development of this disk in his working mechanical televisor system.

Philo Farnsworth.the pioneer of electronic television. This man's contributions are often forgotten. His design and format of television architecture owes much to his work in the 1920s and 1930s. Farnsworth was born in Indiana Springs, Utah, where he grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons).  From an early age he took an interest in electrical circuits and basic electronics.  Whilst still a teenager, he received local funding to carry out experiments with television.  By the time he reached 21, Farnsworth had a working Cathode Ray tube television, and had attracted the attention of the electronics firm RCA.  However, despite his early success, he like many inventors and pioneers suffered from commercial pressures, and once his ideas had been taken up, he was ignored by the industry he had helped established. When Philo Farnsworth died, his valuable contribution to the development of television was almost completely unknown by the general public.


These days of digital programmes, much use is made of computer programming and elaborate software. It should be noted that the first true computer programmer and friend of Charles Babbage was Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron.The computer Language ADA is named after her. A good web site is : http://www.aimsedu.org/Math_History/Samples/ADA/Ada.html

Vladimir K. Zworykin (1889-1982) Vladimir K. Zworykin is responsible for developing some of the more important electronic TV camera and receiver technologies.  As a student in Russia, Zworykin had the good fortune to study under Boris Rosing, an early cathode-ray tube experimenter. After the Russian Revolution, Zworykin immigrated to the United States of America in 1919. There he started his research on the "Iconoscope" (which was an early electronic camera tube) which he eventually patented in 1923.

Like the great Tesla before him, Zworykin started working on “television” although some of his superiors thought this was a waste of time. Over the next five or so years he continued research in both photoelectric and receiving tubes, and in November, 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television receiver using a "Kinescope" (picture tube).

 David Sarnoff, head of RCS invited Zworykin to work for RCA exclusively on ,television research, This resulted in RCA's introduction of television at the New York World's Fair. In 1954, Zworykin retired as Director of Electronics Research for RCA, although he continued to work as a consultant. He died in 1982

Allen Balcom Du Mont -- 1901-1965: Dr. Allen Balcom Du Mont, was a pioneer in the practical development of television, and died in 1965, aged 64.  He was one of the first to become a millionaire from television. Dr. Du Mont, of New Jersey is credited with making significant contributions to the evolution of the television industry by simplifying and improving the production of cathode ray tubes. Until his discoveries in the 1930's, cathode ray tubes, the basis of all electronic television, almost exclusively made in Germany and were expensive, another problem was that they often burned out after 25 or 30 hours.

Du Mont started his career with the great Westinghouse Corporation, who had already employed the genius Tesla. Du Mont later worked for DeForest before going it alone.

Using his garage as a laboratory at his home, Dr. Du Mont developed a cathode ray tube that could be manufactured relatively inexpensively and lasted for a thousand hours on average. The spinning disk developed by Larner, Baird and others used scanned electrical impulses and gave a motion picture effect. The picture was not always satisfactory. Further research had already been conducted in the UK and Germany using a scanning technique that made an electronic beam formed a picture by speeding back and forth across a fluorescent screen placed at the end of a tube. This formed the basis of the Cathode ray Tube, which is only now being replaced by LCD and Plasma technology. Du Mont had been working for the DeForest Corporation to develop his own tubes. However a spin off from his work was the Cathode ray Oscillograph, most used in X-ray and other medical applications. More coming soon

Kenjiro Takayanagi 1899-1990 Kenjiro Takayanagi has been credited as the first scientist to successfully transmit and receive an image on a cathode ray tube. He developed an all-electronic television in 1935. Takayanagi was a teacher at the Hamamatsu Technical High School in Japan, he began his experiments during the late Taisho Era and conducted a successful public demonstration using the Braun tube system at a television conference at the Tokyo branch of the Electrical Academy in 1928. Aside from his inventions, Takayanagi also contributed to the success of JVC by serving as one of its top electronics advisors. In 1959, he developed the first two-headed VTR and worked on the development of the VHS videocassette system. He received Japan’s national Order of Cultural Merit in 1981 for his achievements in electronics engineering research. Takayanagi is often referred to as the Father of Japanese television

Dénes von Mihály  1894-1953 a Hungarian who published the first book exclusively about pictures via radio (basis for television), in Germany in 1923, and later developed his own mechanical receiver design, the "Telehor."  A biography being prepared

Manfred Von Ardenne , 1907-1997,  was born  in Hamburg, Germany, and his  aristocratic family later moved to Berlin. His grandmother Elisabeth von Plotho had reputedly been the inspiration for Theodor Fontane's novel Effie Briest (1895). Ardenne obtained his first patent, for a type of cathode ray tube, whilst only 15 years old! After selling the patent to a commercial company ,Ardenne left school to pursue research. In 1925 he developed the world's first broadband amplifier, which later contributed to the development of radar. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the University of Berlin), but later dropped out 2 years of study as he preferred research to academic study! Thereafter he focused on  applied physics research.In 1928 Ardenne inherited his family wealth and used a lot of it to set up a research laboratory in Berlin, which he was director of until 1945.  

During the period 1928 and 1945, Ardenne took part in the development of the scanning electron microscope and of television. He demonstrated what some regard as the first completely electronic television (using a “flying spot scanner” in Berlin in 1931, and achieved his first transmission of television pictures on Christmas Eve in 1933. During the Second World War he received funding for the development of radar for the Luftwaffe and German Navy; however he encountered problems developing a mass produced version. 

After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Ardenne worked in the Deutsch Democratic Republic (East Germany) which was under Soviet control. Between 1945 and 1954 he worked on the Soviet Union's development of the atom bomb, and later moved his Berlin research institute to Sukhumi, Georgia, USSR. Here he  developed a magnetic isotope separator for the industrial production of uranium 235. In 1953 he was awarded the prestigious (in the USSR) Stalin Prize. He then returned to the DDR (East Germany) to become a professor at the Technical University Dresden. He also founded a research institute in Dresden in 1955, which had over 500 employees, despite being under “independent control.  When the Berlin Wall was destroyed and Germany was re-united the Institute collapsed with huge amount of debts. It later became the Von Ardenne Anlagentechnik GmbH. Up to his death Ardenne continued to make scientific advances including in the treatment of cancer.

With Plasma, Liquid crystal, mobile and IPTV taking over the world, the humble Cathode Ray Tube is falling out of favour. I am preparing a short history on this wonderful device. It will be posted on this site soon.

More biographies are being prepared and will be posted soon