Владимир Зворыкин: Телевидение Технологиясының Изыншысы

Russian American engineer (1888–1982)

Vladimir Kosma Zworykinefn|name=name|Влади́мир Козьми́ч Зворы́кин; or with the patronymic as Kosmich; or Кузьмич. Zworykin anglicized his name to Vladimir Kosma Zworykin,) was a Russian American inventor, engineer, and pioneer of television technology. Zworykin invented a television transmitting and receiving system employing cathode ray tubes. He played a role in the practical development of television from the early thirties, including charge storage type tubes, infrared image tubes and the electron microscope.

Vladimir Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, in 1888 or 1889, to the family of a prosperous merchants. He had a relatively calm upbringing, and he rarely saw his father except on religious holidays. He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, under Boris Rosing. He helped Rosing with experimental work on television in the basement of Rosing's private lab at the School of Artillery of Saint Petersburg. They worked on the problem of "electrical telescopy," something Zworykin had never heard of before. At this time, electrical telescopy (or television as it was later called) was just a dream. Zworykin did not know that others had been studying the idea since the 1880s, or that Professor Rosing had been working on it in secret since 1902 and had made excellent progress. Rosing had filed his first patent on a television system in 1907, featuring a very early cathode ray tube as a receiver, and a mechanical device as a transmitter. Its demonstration in 1911, based on an improved design, was the world's first demonstration of TV of any kind. Zworykin married Tatiana Vasilieva in 1916, they had two daughters (the couple separated in early 1930s).

Zworykin graduated in 1912. He then studied X rays under professor Paul Langevin in Paris. He was awarded a patent for the 1925 application in 1928,

[[Image:Zworykin patent (1923). jpg|thumb|left|Drawing from Zworykin's 1923 patent application Television System. and the transmitter was still of a mechanical type. A "breakthrough" would come when the Zworykin team decided to develop a new type of cathode ray transmitter, one described in the French and British patents of 1928 priority by the Hungarian inventor Kálmán Tihanyi whom the company had approached in July 1930, after the publication of his patents in England and France. This was a curious design, one where the scanning electron beam would strike the photoelectric cell from the same side where the optical image was cast. Even more importantly, it was a system characterized by an operation based on an entirely new principle, the principle of the accumulation and storage of charges during the entire time between two scansions by the cathode ray beam. According to Albert Abramson, Zworykin's experiments started in April 1931, and after the achievement of the first promising experimental transmitters, on October 23, 1931, it was decided that the new camera tube would be named the iconoscope. Zworykin first presented his iconoscope to RCA in 1932. He continued work on it, and
"[t]he image iconoscope, presented in 1934, was a result of a collaboration between Zworykin and RCA's licensee Telefunken. In 1935 the Reichspost started the public broadcastings using this tube and applying a 180 lines system." Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application; while a second one was eventually issued in 1938 by the Court of Appeals on a non Farnsworth related interference case, and over the objection of the Patent Office.

Zworykin married for a second time in 1951. His wife was Katherine Polevitzky (1888 1985), a Russian born professor of bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the second marriage for both. The ceremony was in Burlington, New Jersey. A photographic record of his marriage and worldwide tour can be viewed online. He retired in 1954. New frontiers in medical engineering and biological engineering appealed to him, and he became a founder and first president of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering. The Federation continues to honor outstanding research engineering with a Zworykin Award, the prize being travelling funds to the award's presentation at a World Congress.

Zworykin died on July 29, 1982, in Princeton, New Jersey.

[[Image:Zworykin1931iconoscope. png|thumb|right|Vladimir Zworykin's patent diagram of an iconoscope, 1931, with an apparatus similar to the camera part. In 1941, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Howard N. Potts Medal from The Franklin Institute in 1947. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1948. He was named honorary vice president of RCA in 1954. In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member, awarded him the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the instruments of science, engineering, and television and for his stimulation of the application of engineering to medicine. He was founder president of the International Federation for Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering, a recipient of the Faraday Medal from Great Britain (1965), and a member of the U. S. National Hall of Fame from 1977. From 1952 to 1986, the IEEE made awards to worthy engineers in the name of Vladimir K. Zworykin. More recently the Zworykin Award has been bestowed by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering. The most complete list of Zworykin's awards can be found online at historyTV. net .

Zworykin was inducted into the New Jersey Inventor's Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Additionally, Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon has named a street on its campus after Zworykin. In 1995 University of Illinois Press published Zworykin, Pioneer of Television by Albert Abramson. In 2010 Leonid Parfyonov produced a documentary film "Zvorykin Muromets" about Zworykin. Zworykin is listed in the Russian American Chamber of Fame of Congress of Russian Americans, which is dedicated to Russian immigrants who made outstanding contributions to American science or culture.