7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Vladimir Zworykin

(b. July 30, 1889, Murom, Russia—d. July 29, 1982, Princeton, N.J., U.S.)

V

ladimir Kosma Zworykin, a Russian-born American
electronic engineer and inventor, is considered to be
the father of modern television.
After education at the St. Petersburg Institute of
Technology and the Collegè de France, in Paris, Zworykin
served during World War I in the Russian Signal Corps.
He emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a
naturalized citizen in 1924. In 1920 he joined the
Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh, and in
1923 he filed a patent application for an all-electronic
television system, although he was as yet unable to build
and demonstrate it. In 1929 he convinced David Sarnoff,
vice president and general manager of Westinghouse’s
parent company, the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), to support his research by predicting that in two
years, with $100,000 of funding, he could produce a
workable electronic television system. Meanwhile, the
first demonstration of a primitive electronic system had
been made in San Francisco in 1927 by Philo Taylor
Farnsworth, a young man with only a high-school edu-
cation. Farnsworth had garnered research funds by
convincing his investors that he could market an economi-
cally viable television system in six months for an
investment of only $5,000. In the event, it took the efforts
of both men and more than $50 million before anyone
made a profit.
With his first $100,000 of RCA research money,
Zworykin developed a workable cathode-ray receiver that
he called the Kinescope. At the same time, Farnsworth
was perfecting his Image Dissector camera tube. In 1930
Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s laboratory and was given
a demonstration of the Image Dissector. At that point a