Vladimir Zworykin — inv. (television) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born at Murom on the Oka, in Vladimir Governorate, in 1888 or 1889 - the sources disagree, and so, at times, did he. His father Kosma Zworykin ran a fleet of river steamboats and a good part of the family were engineers, so the boy's interest was unremarkable in its setting.
At the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology he fell in with Boris Rosing, who had filed the first Russian patent for a television system in 1907 and was working on a cathode-ray tube as a display device. From 1910 to 1912 Zworykin assisted him in the evenings in the basement laboratory at the artillery school. Rosing's camera still depended on a rotating mirror drum - moving parts - and Zworykin came away convinced that the thing would only work properly when the camera was a cathode-ray tube as well. That conviction occupied the next twenty years of his life.
He graduated in 1912, went to the College de France to study X-rays under Paul Langevin, and served through the First World War as a radio officer in the Russian signal corps, marrying Tatiana Vasilieff in 1915. He and his wife left Russia during the revolution and were in the United States by 1919; he became a citizen in 1924.
The American years began awkwardly. Westinghouse in Pittsburgh hired him in 1920 but wanted radio research, not television; he left for a small firm in Kansas City and returned to Westinghouse in 1923 only on the condition that he could work on the problem he cared about. He applied that year for a patent on the iconoscope, a storage-type camera tube, and demonstrated a prototype in 1924. In 1929 he produced the kinescope, the receiving tube that made a usable picture.
What turned the laboratory work into an industry was another emigrant from the Russian Empire. David Sarnoff, general manager and later president of RCA, had come from a village near Minsk; he backed Zworykin's programme, moved him to the Camden laboratories in 1930 and put him in charge of television development. Between them they took electronic television from apparatus to broadcast service.
He was not the sole inventor of it, and said so. Philo Farnsworth won a substantial patent suit against RCA in 1939, and the record shows parallel invention rather than a single line of descent - Rosing, Farnsworth, Baird, Takayanagi, Tihanyi and a good many industrial engineers all belong in the account. Zworykin's own position was that television was the work of hundreds of people. His distinctive contribution was to hold the whole electronic chain in view at once while pushing individual devices into working form.
He also worked on the electron microscope, the photomultiplier and infrared image tubes, took the IRE Medal of Honor in 1951 and the IEEE Edison Medal in 1952, and retired in 1954. He kept a 21-inch RCA set in the corner of a room and seldom switched it on. Asked in 1981 what he made of American television programming, he said it was awful. He died at Princeton in 1982.
"Left Russia during the revolution; in the United States by 1919, citizen 1924"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Murom
He left Russia during the revolution and reached the United States by 1919. His work was backed at RCA by David Sarnoff, another emigrant from the Russian Empire - the pairing that carried electronic television from laboratory apparatus to broadcast service.
Born at Murom in Vladimir Governorate, son of Kosma Zworykin, who operated river steamboats on the Oka. Studied at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology, where from 1910 to 1912 he assisted Boris Rosing on his cathode-ray television experiments.
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Murom. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.