V k zworykin biography of martin

One of the foremost figures in the complex history of television is Vladimir Zworykin (1889-1982), who invented the “iconoscope,” “kinemascope,” and “storage principle” that became the basis of TV as we know it. 

Born in 1889 in Murom, Russia, 200 miles east of Moscow, Vladimir Kosma Zworykin began his career in electrical engineering at the age of nine, repairing equipment on his father’s riverboats.  His formal career began at the Imperial Institute of Technology in St.

Petersburg (1908), where he had the good fortune to work with Boris Rosing, the director of the school’s labs. 

The idea of sending images by wire had been tantalizing scientists since 1839.  The earliest mechanical television systems, like the one patented by the German Paul Nipkow in 1884, projected light onto a light-sensitive area through a series of holes cut near the rim of a spinning disc.  In 1897, another German, Karl Braun, invented the cathode ray oscil