Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

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

is, arrangements where the control action of the time component of the light effect is more than 1/n s (e.g. n = 16) provide possibly the only attainable future solution for transmission of pictures of normal brightness" (8). Thus in this book, professor Schröter, to whom Tihanyi had personally disclosed his inventions in the summer of 1928 (9) [having declined to recommend it for development by Telefunken, despite his obvious initial enthusiasm (10)] while clearly analyzing the difference between non-storage plans and storage technology, mentions Tihanyi among the inventors who had proposed the former (Schoultz, Seguin, Zworykin, Sabbah, von Cordelli). It is worth noting that Schröter, in the same book, praising Zworykin's achievements in the area of electronic television receivers, describes his efforts regarding television transmission as ..unrealized proposals". Although protests by Kaiman Tihanyi led to corrections in Schröter's next book (11) — this time giving credit for the ..concept of the storage principle" to Tihanyi and for the ..technical solution" to Zworykin, with frequent references made to „Zworykin's iconoscope" — as historian Paul Vajda later observed, the author „again suppressed the fact that precisely what was new in this transmission tube, the charge storage, was Kaiman Tihanyi's invention" (12). This slanted presentation could perhaps be ascribed to the increasingly strong relationship between Telefunken and RCA, and the disingenuous information received through Zworykin (13) and RCA public relations releases, in addition to a possible desire to justify Telefunken having turned down Tihanyi in 1928. It is namely quite clear that based on the only patent issued to Zworykin for a television transmitter (14) preceding the book's publication, there was no evidence of his priority with regard to storage technology. Since logic would dictate that Zworykin's still pending 1923 application did not describe a more advanced technology, Schröter's treatment of the issue was certainly not based on hard evidence. This treatment elicited further protest from Tihanyi who, in two letters to Schröter (15) defended his authorship and again demanded correction, pointing to his 1926 Hungarian application and his 1928 patents as the origin of both the storage concept and storage television technology (16). In an April 1940 response to a letter from Schröter, Tihanyi writes: „Please be kind enough to take into consideration that, for years, Zworykin was unable to produce any practical result based on his own plans, despite the fact that he had the giant laboratories of RCA at his disposal, and that he was only able to develop the image storage tube after the publication of my plans.