"Television will be of no importance in your lifetime or mine."
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, 1948
Though seen as a thoroughly American invention, television's roots are Russian. Vladimir Zworykin (1889- 1982) studied electrical engineering at the St. Petersburg State Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg. Boris Rosing, a professor in charge of laboratory projects, tutored Zworykin and introduced his student to his experiments of transmitting pictures by wire. Zworykin and Rosing went on to develop a very rudimentary television system in the early 1900s.
Russia's revolution split up the duo and halted their research. Rosing died in exile, but his student, Zworykin, settled in the United States and continued their research as an employee of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. By 1923 Zworykin had developed the first all-electric camera tube, which he called an "iconoscope" meaning "viewer of icons." The iconoscope was a modified cathode ray tube, a device developed by William Crookes.
Zworykin's device did not impress his supervisors at Westinghouse, but in his free time he developed a better iconoscope (the "kinescope") and in 1929 showed off his all-electric television to a radio engineer convention. David Sarnoff, an executive at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), saw potential in television and set Zworykin to work as Director of RCA's Electronic Research Lab.
It would be twenty years before televisions were common to American households. Along the way there was enough drama—lawsuits, blown budgets, buy-outs, and World War II—to fill a television show. It all began, however, with a persistent inventor and the iconoscope he created.
