Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

TANULMÁNYOK - Tihanyi Glass, Katalin: The Iconoscope: Kalman Tihanyi and the Development of Modern Television

Corporation of America knew that they were witnessing the future itself. The new television transmitter that made this possible was the iconoscope, a so-called ..storage" tube, whose invention was attributed to the Russian-born RCA engineer, V. K. Zworykin. This storage television system and its further refined Incarnations would prove a remarkably enduring concept, considering that it is only now being replaced with new technology, digital television. The attribution of the iconoscope to Zworykin was the almost universally accepted view until the early 70's, especially In America, where both the popular and the technical literature would usually list his 1923 patent application as the basis for the storage camera, and where articles written on celebratory occasions would frequently talk about him as „the father of television". As for Zworykin's own publications about the iconoscope and its later developed versions, although neither his important 1934 article, entitled „The Iconoscope — A Modern Version of the Electric Eye" nor any of his subsequent writings claim the iconoscope outright as his own invention, this is invariably implied between the lines (5). The hidden factors surrounding the development of the iconoscope remained concealed for the next forty years. Interestingly, a review of the European historical literature published between the early 30's and early 70's reveals that the authors are frequently equivocal regarding the origin of the storage principle and storage television. Thus some writers credit the ubiquitously mentioned but never clearly postulated ..storage principle" to the Hungarian physicist, Kaiman Tihanyi, and the iconoscope to Zworykin (6), others speak of parallel invention. Yet others take the curious position that „Tihanyi's invention was so far ahead of its time that It was never ralized" (7). Two of these European publications, prof. Fritz Schröter's 1933 and 1937 surveys of television development, deserve special attention, due to the author's involvement in television experiments as head of the laboratories at Telefunken — in addition to his expert status as professor at the Berlin Technical Institute —and because of his first-hand knowledge of the Hungarian inventor's proposals regarding storage-based television. In his comprehensive 1933 survey Schröter dismisses electronic television plans In general and states that none of the solutions he had discussed „have the chance of being realized in the forseeable future," then adds: „We can, however, justify a discussion of these proposals by emphasizing a possibility of extraordinary significance: those arrangements which, using the capacity of Individual cells, permit the storage of light effect; that