Flechsig, W.

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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fl. c.1938 Germany

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German engineer notable for early patents that foreshadowed the development of the shadowmask colour cathode ray tube.

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In 1938, whilst working for a German electrical company, Flechsig filed a patent in which he described the use of an array of stretched parallel wires to control the landing of either one or three electron beams on separate red, green and blue phosphor stripes within a single cathode ray tube. Whilst the single-beam arrangement required subsidiary deflection to alternate the beam landing angle, the three-beam version effectively used the wires to "mask" the landing of the electron beams so that each one only illuminated the relevant colour phosphor stripes. Although not developed at the time, the concept anticipated the subsequent invention of the shadowmask tube by RCA in the early 1950s and, even more closely, the development of the Sony Trinitron some years later.

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Bibliography

1938, German patent no. 736, 575.

1941, French patent no. 866, 065.

Further Reading

E.W.Herold, 1976, "A history of colour television displays", Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 64:1,331.

K.G.Freeman, "The history of colour CRTs. A personal view", International Conference on the History of Television, Institution of Electrical Engineers Publication no. 271, p.

38.

See also: Baird, John Logie; Goldmark, Peter Carl

KF