Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

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

priority patents since at least 1930 — the absence of even the slightest acknowledgement in the 1934, 1937 and 1939 papers authored or coauthored by Zworykin, with the credit for these innovations distributed to various RCA workers' much later patent applications, seems a glaring misrepresentation of the facts. The trials of an independent inventor With a grant which enabled him to travel abroad in the hope of selling his patents, Kaiman Tlhanyi arrived in Berlin in June of 1928. Prior to this, he had presented his television plans to Prof. Emmerich Poeschl (32) and, in April 1927, in Vienna, to Prof. Schweiger, head of the Austrian Radio's laboratories, who invited him to conduct experiments at the labs and gave him a letter of recommendation to Count Arco, founding director of Telefunken (33). Diary notes from 1928 reveal that the inventor gave detailed Information about his plans first to Count Arco and Schröter, subsequently (in a meeting with the director, chief engineers and patent attorneys) to Siemens, as well as to professors Karolus and Korn, and thereafter to just about all other companies in Berlin — and, judged by his letters, later in London — involved in work on (mechanical) television systems. Historically, it is interesting to note that despite the initial enthusiasm for • his entirely novel solutions to the problem of television, all of them decided to continue experimenting with mechanical television systems until the mid to late thirties, at which time they discarded these efforts in favor of storage television, for which they ended up paying royalties to RCA. While the negotiations in Berlin continued through 1929 and Tihanyi accepted an offer from Siemens to provide improvements for their (Karolus) picture telegraph, on August 8, respective September 4, 1929, the very extensive abstracts of his British patent specifications were published in the Illustrated Official Journal (Patents). Shortly thereafter, patent to his French application was issued; the patent was published in February 1930. As a result of these publications, Kaiman Tlhanyi's plans were accessible to all workers In the field. Letters written by the inventor (34) indicate that word of RCA's interest in his patents reached him in the latter half of 1930. Apparently, after an extensive search, RCA located him in London, where he was at work on the prototype of his photoelectric torpedo — a pilotless miniature airplane that could see, follow, and destroy moving targets —under contract with