Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology

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b. 30 July 1889 Mourum (near Moscow), Russia

d. 29 July 1982 New York City, New York, USA

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Russian (naturalized American 1924) television pioneer who invented the iconoscope and kinescope television camera and display tubes.

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Zworykin studied engineering at the Institute of Technology in St Petersburg under Boris Rosing, assisting the latter with his early experiments with television. After graduating in 1912, he spent a time doing X-ray research at the Collège de France in Paris before returning to join the Russian Marconi Company, initially in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. On the outbreak of war in 1917, he joined the Russian Army Signal Corps, but when the war ended in the chaos of the Revolution he set off on his travels, ending up in the USA, where he joined the Westinghouse Corporation. There, in 1923, he filed the first of many patents for a complete system of electronic television, including one for an all-electronic scanning pick-up tube that he called the iconoscope. In 1924 he became a US citizen and invented the kinescope, a hard-vacuum cathode ray tube (CRT) for the display of television pictures, and the following year he patented a camera tube with a mosaic of photoelectric elements and gave a demonstration of still-picture TV. In 1926 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Pittsburgh and in 1928 he was granted a patent for a colour TV system.

In 1929 he embarked on a tour of Europe to study TV developments; on his return he joined the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as Director of the Electronics Research Group, first at Camden and then Princeton, New Jersey. Securing a budget to develop an improved CRT picture tube, he soon produced a kinescope with a hard vacuum, an indirectly heated cathode, a signal-modulation grid and electrostatic focusing. In 1933 an improved iconoscope camera tube was produced, and under his direction RCA went on to produce other improved types of camera tube, including the image iconoscope, the orthicon and image orthicon and the vidicon. The secondary-emission effect used in many of these tubes was also used in a scintillation radiation counter. In 1941 he was responsible for the development of the first industrial electron microscope, but for most of the Second World War he directed work concerned with radar, aircraft fire-control and TV-guided missiles.

After the war he worked for a time on high-speed memories and medical electronics, becoming Vice-President and Technical Consultant in 1947. He "retired" from RCA and was made an honorary vice-president in 1954, but he retained an office and continued to work there almost up until his death; he also served as Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1954 until 1962.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Zworykin received some twenty-seven awards and honours for his contributions to television engineering and medical electronics, including the Institution of Electrical Engineers Faraday Medal 1965; US Medal of Science 1966; and the US National Hall of Fame 1977.

Bibliography

29 December 1923, US patent no. 2,141, 059 (the original iconoscope patent; finally granted in December 1938!).

13 July 1925, US patent no. 1,691, 324 (colour television system).

1930, with D.E.Wilson, Photocells and Their Applications, New York: Wiley. 1934, "The iconoscope. A modern version of the electric eye". Proceedings of the

Institute of Radio Engineers 22:16.

1946, Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope.

1940, with G.A.Morton, Television; revised 1954.

1949, with E.G.Ramberg, Photoelectricity and Its Applications. 1958, Television in Science and Industry.

Further Reading

J.H.Udelson, 1982, The Great Television Race: History of the Television Industry 1925– 41: University of Alabama Press.

See also: Baird, John Logie; Farnsworth, Philo Taylor; Jenkins, Charles Francis

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