Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

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

In early February 1935, ..urgent" cables from RCA to Tihanyl indicate that company representatives arrived in Budapest for the signature of additional papers and that these were signed on February 15th. On March 8, the Tihanyi application was revived and filed as two separate applications, transmitter and receiver, now under RCA aegis. On March 13, RCA filed an application for the trademark ..Iconoscope," curiously enough, claiming use of the name only since February 13, 1935 (48). Archival files of the Tihanyi transmitter application, U.S. Pat. 2,158,259, and of the November 13, 1931 Zworykin application seem to indicate that the struggle to secure for the Zworykin patent at least some of the claims related to the iconoscope technology must have continued after the August 1934 rejection by the examiner. But on March 18, 1935, RCA attorney H.G. Grover stated on behalf of Tihanyi that four of the six claims previously denied the Zworykin application would be ..canceled from the Zworykin patent in that the common assignee will elect to prosecute the said claims in this application" (49). In an April 9, 1935 brief to the Commissioner of Patents, RCA attorney R. Goldsborough on behalf of Zworykin, canceled all six claims „in view of the examiner's rejection of the same on Figure 9 of Tihanyi 313, 456," the first of the two British patents (50). These briefs signify the final capitulation of the effort to persuade the U.S. Patent Office regarding Zworykin's priority to controlling features of the iconoscope. Parallel with these developmets and entirely contradicting what went on in the patent office, Zworykin's prestige grew at an accelerated pace following the January 1934 publication of his paper, „The Iconoscope — A Modern Version Of The Electric Eye" in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers. The introduction to the article established the link to the 1923 patent. It said: „This paper gives a preliminary outline of work with a device which is truly an electric eye, the iconoscope, as a means of viewing a scene for television transmission and similar applications. It required ten years to bring the original Idea to its present state of perfection". But while Zworykin's rendition of television's development was further propagated and gained almost universal acceptance, his 1923 application itself was embroiled in a series of interference proceedings Zworykin had initiated against rival inventors, including Philo Farnsworth, with most of these cases ending in defeat (51). In 1938, however, Zworykin's claim to priority was finally legitimized when, being judged the winning party of an Interference against another inventor, H.J. Round, the District Court of Delaware issued patent on his 1923 application. Of course, no one had reason to doubt that the text as eventually