Technikatörténeti szemle 20. (1993)

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

Kaiman Tihanyi (1897-1947) Kalnian Tihanyi studied in Pozsony and Budapest. By age fifteen, he had several small inventions, and was only seventeen years old when he sold his patented remote control for city lights to a Viennese manufacturer. A list of ..Future projects" dating from the same year included: device for the prevention of train collision, hydrogen-oxygen motor, scanner with selenium cells against the grounding of ships, automatically guided torpedo, remote controlled submarine boat and submarine mine. Interestingly enough, all these projects were later realized. During World War I, Tihanyi served as artillery engineer, then as radio engineer at the Austro-Hungarian Navy Headquarters in Pola, where his remote controlled submarine mine was developed and successfully used. It was subsequently honored as an outstanding military Invention. Though his preoccupation with the problem of television goes back to at least 1917, it was not until 1924 that Tihanyi found the solution he was looking for and began coducting experiments. By April 1925, he had confirmed the soundness of his plans; on March 20, 1926, he applied for his first television patent, introducing the concept of ..storage".