Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

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

produced on the receiving screen. Several sources agree with historian Albert Abramson's account (25) (based on Westinghouse Research Report #R429A, marked ..confidential") that following the demonstration Zworykin was instructed to „work on something more practical". It seems he subsequently did not participate in any of Westinghouse' television projects, which were headed by Dr. Frank Conrad. The storage principle Much as it has been cited in historical accounts, the curious will search in vain in standard physics textbooks and reference books for a postulate of the ..storage principle," and though we often encounter the accurate albeit superficial explanation that under this principle the accumulation of charges continues during the entire scansion cycle, how this is done is not clearly explained. The earliest reference to the new phenomenon this writer found is in an article, entitled „About the Electronic Television," written by Kalman Tihanyi and published on May 3, 1925, nearly one year prior to his first application for patent on an all-electronic television system. Although the inventor does not use the term ..storage" principle" or ..storage effect," the description of the new phenomenon he had discovered implies that that is exactly what he had in mind. Thus, he wrote: „The writer of this article has studied thoroughly all phenomena known from the current state of the physical sciences which could be applied to the solution of the problem and on the basis of control calculations found them unfit for the achievement of the minimally required 1/80,000 s efficiency at the transmitting station. However, during experimentation a new physical phenomenon was discovered, under which the optical and the electrical effect Is practically simultaneous. In fact displacement between the two effects could not be detected with our instruments, although the possibility exists for a displacement on the order of 1/400 million s based on Maxwell's equations in regard to a related phenomenon. This means that under this phenomenon not only the desirable 1/150,000 s changes, but 1/400,000,000 changes can be followed" (26). (Emphasis added.) An investigation of various dictionaries and lexicons confirms that, indeed, in addition to the photoelectric (or photoemissive) effect, storage television technology also involves an entirely different phenomenon. Evident from these characterizations is that while under the photoelectric effect bound electrons released from such photosensitive materials vary