Vladimir Zworykin

Russian-born American engineer and inventor

• Born: July 30, 1889
• Birthplace: Murom, Russia
• Died: July 29, 1982
• Place of death: Princeton, New Jersey

Frequently considered the founder of television, Zworykin invented both the iconoscope camera tube and the kinescope picture tube, which together form the electronic television system.

Early Life

Vladimir Zworykin (VLAHD-eh-meer ZWAWR-i-kihn) was born in Mourom, Russia, on the Oka River, where his father, Kosma Zworykin, owned a fleet of steamboats. Since many family members were engineers, young Vladimir manifested an interest in engineering. As an undergraduate student at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, he first became interested in television. There, Professor Boris Rosing was working on a cathode-ray tube for use as the picture-forming device. In Rosing’s system, the camera depended on mechanically moving parts. Zworykin, assisting the professor in the evenings, came to the conclusion that television could be perfected only if the camera were also a cathode-ray tube.

After he was graduated in 1912, Zworykin entered the College of France in Paris. There, he gained an understanding of theoretical physics while studying X rays under the renowned Professor Paul Langevin until the beginning of World War I in 1914. Returning home, Zworykin became an officer in the Russian Signal Corps, in which he was assigned work on radio transmission. On April 17, 1916, he married Tatiana Vasilieff. They had two children, Nina and Elaine, the latter of whom was named for Zworykin’s mother. This marriage was later to end in divorce. In 1951, he married Dr. Katherine Polevitzky, who survived him.

At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Zworykin was in Moscow at the factory of the Russian Marconi Company. He decided to escape from the Soviet Union. The journey of eighteen months took him down the Ob River to the Arctic Ocean and then to Norway, Denmark, Great Britain, and finally, in 1919, the United States. Unable to find an appropriate position, he worked as a bookkeeper for the financial agent of the Soviet Embassy.

Life’s Work

In 1920, Zworykin began working for Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was most fortunate, as Westinghouse was a world leader in the development of radio. In addition, its research interests were expanding. Except for a brief absence, Zworykin spent the 1920’s at Westinghouse, and while there, he pursued a great variety of scientific problems that the burgeoning field of electronics presented: radio receiving valves, mercury rectifiers, and photoelectric cells.

It was television, however, that compelled Zworykin’s interest. Earlier experimental television systems had handled only an element of the picture at a time, requiring an intense illumination of the scene, impractical since most of the light was wasted. Zworykin conceived of a camera that would store the light from an entire picture until it could be measured by a rapidly scanning electron beam. The sensitivity and detail of such a camera would be far higher than those of previous systems. Zworykin developed his first functioning iconoscope, as he called it, in 1923 (from the Greek eikon, meaning “image,” and skopon, “to watch”). This television-camera tube equipped for rapid scanning of an image-storing photoactive mosaic was demonstrated in Pittsburgh in 1924, but the images were dim and shadowy. The Westinghouse executives were unimpressed, and Zworykin was permitted to work on television only intermittently.

Meanwhile, he had been building his reputation and career in the United States. In 1924, Zworykin became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1926, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.

Zworykin’s work on television attracted the attention of a fellow Russian immigrant, David Sarnoff, general manager and vice president (later president) of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Westinghouse and RCA were closely allied at the time, and Sarnoff urged Westinghouse to devote more effort to research on television. It did, but only modestly. Improved versions of the iconoscope were demonstrated in 1927 and again in 1929. It was in 1929 that Zworykin obtained his first patent on color television.

Sarnoff, a visionary who believed in the commercial feasibility of television, persuaded Westinghouse (which was then a major stockholder in RCA) to move the effort to RCA. Zworykin accordingly transferred, along with several other scientists, and became director of electronics research at RCA in Camden, New Jersey, in 1929. Famous in the history of RCA was a meeting between Sarnoff and Zworykin in which the RCA president asked how much it would cost to perfect a television system. “About $100,000,” Zworykin replied. As Sarnoff was later fond of telling, RCA was to spend fifty million dollars before realizing a cent of profit from television.

At RCA, Zworykin was able to develop further what he called the kinescope (“kine” from the Greek kinesis, “motion”), the picture tube of the television set. Zworykin’s kinescope was a cathode-ray tube in which electrons bombard a screen of fluorescent material. This system gave a clearer picture than systems using a mechanically rotating scanning disc yielding only 120 lines on the screen. Zworykin’s kinescope image was steadily improved, 240 lines, 343, 441, and so forth. (By the late twentieth century, most televisions had 525 lines.) In addition, the size of the picture-tube screen was enlarged. One test in 1936 utilized a “large” 7.5-by-12-inch screen. In what was the first showing of a complete program originating in NBC studios in the RCA Building but broadcast from the top of the Empire State Building, a consistent picture was received forty-five miles away.

By 1938, RCA deemed Zworykin’s system commercially feasible, but the required approval of the federal government did not come until July of 1941. In 1940, Zworykin recruited Dr. James Hillier, and in three months’ time, they developed the electron microscope. The United States’ entry into World War II curtailed commercial broadcasting, but RCA continued to fund television research. During the war, a research team headed by Zworykin developed a camera tube one hundred times more sensitive than the iconoscope. After the war, RCA began to market commercially a television with a ten-inch screen. A table model went on sale in the fall of 1946 for $375. Meanwhile, Zworykin became the world leader in the development of color television.

Zworykin retired from RCA in 1954, having served as director of electronic research from 1929 to 1942 and again from 1946 to 1954; associate research director from 1942 to 1945; and vice president, technical consultant, from 1947 to 1954. Zworykin was especially proud of this last title and listed his occupation in Who’s Who in America as business executive.

On his retirement, Zworykin was given a small research laboratory near Princeton, New Jersey, at which he was able to pursue his own interests. There, he envisioned an electronic warning system for automobiles to avert accidents, a “televoter” by which citizens could render instantaneous decisions on public matters, and most important, medical electronics. Becoming the director of the electronics center at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and a founder of the International Federation of Medical Electronics, Zworykin foresaw the potential for the wider use of electronics in medicine. In the 1950’s, the Endoradiosonde, or radio pill, was developed. It utilized a compact transistor oscillator powered by a minute cell to transmit physiological data from inside the human body. Following this development was an ultraviolet microscope using color television in which features in the body appeared in their complexity on the screen of the picture tube. His work on medical electronics was to herald numerous breakthroughs in the use of electronic devices in medicine.

Zworykin coauthored the following four books: Photocells and Their Application, originally published in 1930 and later, in 1949, as Photoelectricity and Its Application; Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940); Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope (1945); and Television in Science and Industry (1958). He also received dozens of awards, including the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest, in 1966.

Significance

Zworykin never was comfortable with the appellation “father of television,” insisting that he was but one of many who worked on its development. Although further refined, his system remains the basis of modern television.

In an accent that remained discernibly Russian after half a century in the United States, the inventor lamented the far-reaching changes his invention wrought, calling it one of the leading causes of juvenile delinquency. Although Zworykin seldom watched television, the American people did. Television changed enormously the entertainment and information-gathering habits of Americans and, in the process, their perception of the world in which they live.

Bibliography

Abramson, Albert. Zworykin: Pioneer of Television. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Abramson provides a comprehensive account of Zworykin’s life and career, maintaining that Zworykin’s inventions made electronic television possible.

Lear, John. “Merchant of Vision.” Saturday Review 40 (June 1, 1957): 43-45. Traces Zworykin’s leadership role in the development of television. Nontechnical.

MacLaurin, William Rupert. Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry. New York: Macmillan, 1949. The chapter on the beginning of the television industry describes Zworykin’s work at Westinghouse Electric and RCA. Largely nontechnical it relates who decided what and why they did it does, however, explain the iconoscope.

Magoun, Alexander B. Television: The Life Story of a Technology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. This history of television technology examines Zworykin’s innovations.

Udelson, Joseph H. The Great Television Race: A History of the American Television Industry, 1925-1941. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Although mainly concerned with the early technological development of television, this work does treat personalities involved. The book ends with the early commercialization of television in 1941.

Webb, Richard C. Tele-Visionaries: The People Behind the Invention of Television. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Interscience, 2005. Includes a chapter about Zworykin’s role in the invention of television.