Zworykin

Abstract

The most concerted and successful effort to develop broadcast television was made by the RCA television research lab on the top floor of the RCA Victor factory in Camden, New Jersey. At this time the company was firmly under the leadership of David Sarnoff, who fully supported lab director Vladimir Kosmich (Anglicized as Kosma) Zworykin (1889–1982) and his efforts to create an all-electronic system. Zworykin, credited as the seminal inventor and research leader in the field, found his calling as a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute working in the lab of his mentor Professor Boris L’vovich Rosing (also given a Rozing). Rosing was one of the first to use the Braun tube as an image display device for what he called electrical telescopy. His student Vladimir was born to a well-off family in Murom, a commercial center 150 hundred miles east of Moscow. Zworykin had originally entered the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute as a physics student, but his father, who ran a passenger ship line on the Oka River, a tributary of the Volga, decided the school was a hotbed of liberal values and had him transfer to the Imperial Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg, where as fate would have it, he met Rosing (Abramson 1995, p. 10). Zworykin remained in St. Petersburg for 6 years, three of them, between 1910 and 1912, were spent working in a cramped basement lab with Rosing. In 1907 Rosing first put together a hybrid television system using an electro-mechanical (mirror-drum) pickup and an electronic (Braun tube) display, as described in the chapter Vision at a Distance. On May 9, 1911, while Zworykin was at St. Petersburg, Rosing made an entry in his notebook describing what he observed on his CRT’s screen as a “distinct image (that) was seen for the first time, consisting of four luminous bands,” which was the most successful transmission he would achieve (Stashower 2002). It was left to Rosing’s pupil to improve his teacher’s design and create the basis for the TV sets that were manufactured in the hundreds of millions.