Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin (Russian: Влади́мир Козьми́ч Зворы́кин - Vladimir Koz'mich Zvorykin) (July 29 [O.S. July 17] 1888 – July 29, 1982) was a Russian-American inventor, engineer, and pioneer of television technology. Zworykin invented a television transmitting and receiving system employing cathode ray tubes. He played a role in the practical development of television from the early thirties, including charge storage-type tubes, infrared image tubes and the electron microscope.[3]

Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, in 1888, on July 29 (old style July 17), to the family of a prosperous merchant.

He had a relatively calm upbringing, and he rarely saw his father except on religious holidays.

He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, under Boris Rosing. He helped Boris Rosing with experimental work on television in the basement of Rosing's private lab at the School of Artillery of Saint Petersburg. Rosing had filed his first patent on a television system in 1907, featuring a very early cathode ray tube as a receiver, and a mechanical device as a transmitter. Its demonstration in 1911, based on an improved design, was among the first demonstrations of TV of any kind.[4]

Drawing from V. Zworykin's 1923 patent application Television System.[5][6]

Vladimir Zworykin's patent diagram of an iconoscope, 1931,[7] with an apparatus similar to the camera part.[5][6]

V. Zworykin graduated in 1912 and, thereafter, studied X-rays under professor Paul Langevin in Paris.[4] During World War I, Zworykin was enlisted and served in the Russian Signal Corps, then succeeded in getting a job working for Russian Marconi, testing radio equipment that was being produced for the Russian Army.

Zworykin decided to leave Russia for the United States in 1918, during the Russian Civil War. He left through Siberia, travelling north on the River Ob to the Arctic Ocean as part of an expedition led by Russian scientist Innokenty P. Tolmachev, eventually arriving in the US at the end of 1918. He returned to Omsk, then capital of Admiral Kolchak's government in 1919, via Vladivostok, then to the United States again on official duties from the Omsk government. These duties ended with the collapse of the White movement in Siberia at the death of Kolchak. V. Zworykin decided, this time, to remain permanently in the US.
Once in the U.S., V. Zworykin found work at the Westinghouse laboratories in Pittsburgh, where he eventually had an opportunity to engage in television experiments. He summarized the resulting invention in two patent applications. The first, entitled "Television Systems", was filed on December 29, 1923, and was followed by a second application in 1925 of essentially the same content, but with minor changes and the addition of a Paget-type screen for color transmission and reception.[8] He was awarded a patent for the 1925 application in 1928,[8] and two patents for the 1923 application that was divided in 1931,[5][6] although the equipment described was never successfully demonstrated.[9][10][11]

Vladimir Zworykin demonstrates electronic television (1929).

Vladimir Zworykin described cathode ray tubes as both transmitter and receiver. The operation, whose basic thrust was to prevent the emission of electrons between scansion cycles, was reminiscent of A. A. Campbell Swinton's proposal published in Nature in June 1908.[12][13] This would result in the television signal being derived from the modest number of electrons released at the instant the cathode ray swept over an image point.[citation needed]
The demonstration given by V. Zworykin sometime in late 1925 or early 1926, was far from a success with the Westinghouse management, even though it showed the possibilities inherent in a system based on the Braun tube. Although he was told by management to "devote his time to more practical endeavours", Zworykin continued his efforts to perfect his system. As attested to by his own writing, including his doctoral dissertation of 1926, earning him a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, his experiments were directed at improving the output of photoelectric cells.
There were, however, limits to how far one could go along these lines, and so, in 1929, V. Zworykin returned to vibrating mirrors and facsimile transmission, filing patents describing these. At this time, however, he was also experimenting with an improved cathode ray receiving tube, filing a patent application for this in November 1929, and introducing the new receiver that he named "Kinescope", reading a paper two days later at a convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers.
Having developed the prototype of the receiver by December, Zworykin met David Sarnoff,[14] who eventually hired him and put him in charge of television development for RCA at their newly established laboratories in Camden, New Jersey.
The move to the laboratories occurred in the spring of 1930 and the difficult task of developing a transmitter could begin. There was an in-house evaluation in mid-1930, where the kinescope performed well (but with only 60 lines definition[15]), and the transmitter was still of a mechanical type. A "breakthrough" would come when the Zworykin team decided to develop a new type of cathode ray transmitter, one described in the French and British patents of 1928 priority by the Hungarian inventor Kalman Tihanyi whom the company had approached in July 1930, after the publication of his patents in England and France. This was a curious design, one where the scanning electron beam would strike the photoelectric cell from the same side where the optical image was cast. Even more importantly, it was a system characterized by an operation based on an entirely new principle, the principle of the accumulation and storage of charges during the entire time between two scansions by the cathode-ray beam.
According to Albert Abramson, Zworykin's experiments started in April 1931, and after the achievement of the first promising experimental transmitters, on October 23, 1931, it was decided that the new camera tube would be named Iconoscope. The system was ready to be launched at the end of 1934, a contract had of course been signed with the Hungarian inventor for the purchase of his patents. In early 1935, the new tube was introduced in Germany. It was soon developed there, with some improvements, and was successfully used at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games as one of several cameras, including Philo Farnsworth's Image Dissector, for film transmission only, broadcasting the games to some two-hundred public theaters. Although the tube went through a number of adjustments and improvements, it continued to be called by the generic name of Iconoscope.
The developments in England, by the British firm Marconi/EMI, followed the original charge storage design under a patent exchange. This electronic system was officially adopted by the BBC whose experimental public broadcasts began in England in November 1936 and initially included the Baird-system. The British electronic system featured 405 scanning lines, while German television adopted 441 line scanning and so did RCA following the initial (1934) 375 line definition.

Vladimir Zworykin married for a second time in 1951. His wife was Katherine Polevitzky (1888-1985), a Russian-born professor of bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the second marriage for both. The ceremony was in Burlington, New Jersey.[16] He retired in 1954.
But new frontiers in medical engineering and biological engineering appealed to him, and he became a founder and first President of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering. The Federation continues to honor outstanding research engineering with a Zworykin Award, the prize being travelling funds to the Award's presentation at a World Congress.[17]

He died on July 29, 1982 in Princeton, New Jersey.[2] His wife Katherine died on February 18,1985.

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Father: (merchant)
Wife: Tatiana Vasilieff (m. 1916)
Wife: Katherine Polevitsky (m. 1951)

VLADIMIR ZVORYKIN - A RUSSIAN AMERICAN WHO INVENTED TELEVISION
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**** The year 1931 marked an event that from time to time occurs in the world of invention. Two engineers living in different parts of the world – Semyon Kataev in Russia and Vladimir Zvorykin in the USA - applied for a patent on a transmitting television tube – “iconoscope”. With only one month and a half’s difference in time* between their applications the two Russian inventors did not start a dispute over who should be considered the first but made friends instead and often saw one another when Zvorykin visited Russia.**
Born into a wealthy family of a merchant in the city of Murom on July 30th, 1889 Vladimir Zvorykin used to spent his summer holidays on board his father’s ship sailing along the Oka River. Out of pleasure he helped repair and maintain the ship’s electrical equipment and since then took an interest in electrical engineering. After becoming an engineer Zvorykin underwent training in France. In August 1917 he and a group of other engineers who were to buy arms for Russia went on a business trip to Europe. Soon afterwards the Bolshevik Revolution shook Russia and Zvorykin never came back.*
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http://www.davidsarnoff.org/vkz.html

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Samuel Fox (17 June 1815 – 25 February 1887) was a British industrialist and businessman noted for developing the Paragon umbrella frame, and the founder of a steelworks in Stocksbridge.

Biography]

Birthplace of Samuel Fox in Bradwell

Fox was born in Bradwell, Derbyshire, on 17 June 1815, the son of a shuttle-weaver.
He started work as an apprentice wire drawer in the firm of Samuel Cocker in Hathersage.
He moved to Stocksbridge in 1842 to establish his own wire drawing business.[1] In 1842, Fox married Maria Radcliffe (born 20 January 1820) at Stannington, Sheffield. They had one son, William Henry Fox (1843–1920) who never married
In 1851 he and his company Fox Umbrella Frames Ltd developed the "Paragon" umbrella frame, a U section of string steel that was far superior to its competitors. Development of the product continued until at least 1935. A similar product was used to make Crinoline frames from 1855. Umbrellas with 'Fox Frames' were sold worldwide.[citation needed]
Fox bought the Bradwell Grove Estate, Holwell, Oxfordshire in 1871.
He died on 25 February 1887. Upon his death, and was buried at his estate North Cliffe, near Market Weighton, East Riding of Yorkshire.[

and education]
Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. In 1912 the family moved to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and town houses.[7] Their art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh.[8] Robert had a younger brother, Frank, who also became a physicist.[9]
Oppenheimer was initially schooled at Alcuin Preparatory School, and in 1911 entered the Ethical Culture Society School.[10] This had been founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". His father had been a member of the Society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915.[11] Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in English and French literature, and particularly in mineralogy.[12] He completed the third and fourth grades in one year, and skipped half the eighth grade.[10] During his final year, he became interested in chemistry.[13] He entered Harvard College a year late, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe. To help him recover from the illness, his father enlisted the help of his English teacher Herbert Smith who took him to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the southwestern United States.[14]
In addition to majoring in chemistry, he was also required by Harvard's rules to study history, literature, and philosophy or mathematics. He made up for his late start by taking six courses each term and was admitted to the undergraduate honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In his first year he was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant he was not required to take the basic classes and could enroll instead in advanced ones. A course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman attracted him to experimental physics. He graduated summa cum laude in three years
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In the summer of 1921 Oppenheimer contracted dysentery on a prospecting trip to Europe. The illness prevented him from entering Harvard that fall. His father resolved to toughen the boy by sending him with a tutor to the West, where he rode horses and delighted in the outdoors. He grew especially fond of the broad mesas of New Mexico, an attachment that figured prominently later in his life.
In 1922 Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard, where he took an intense program that ranged from math and sciences to philosophy and Eastern religions and French and English literature. Among the sciences, he preferred chemistry because it "starts right at the heart of things." He was nevertheless granted advanced standing to work with experimental physicist Percy Bridgeman. Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in 1925. Despite his evident success as a scholar, he was plagued with doubts. In a letter to a friend, Oppenheimer concluded a listing of his feverish academic pursuits with the abrupt phrase "and wish I were dead." As an adult he recalled that, during his adolescent and college years, nearly everything about him aroused "a very great sense of revulsion and wrong."
More anxieties were to follow. During his final semester at Harvard, Oppenheimer applied to study with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. Rutherford thought Oppenheimer's credentials inadequate and turned him down. Oppenheimer then applied to Joseph John Thomson at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and gave him the task of preparing thin films of beryllium. Oppenheimer regarded the work as "a terrible bore" and pronounced himself "so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything."
Oppenheimer's inadequacies as an experimental researcher hardened his resolve to turn to theoretical physics. In 1926 he studied with Max Born at the University of Cِttingen in Germany, from which he received his doctoral degree in March 1927. From 1927 through 1928 he was a National Research Council Fellow. The following year he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. He accepted both and for many years divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley. He attracted a host of brilliant young students and did much to establish the West Coast as one of the nation's most important centers of advanced physics.
Oppenheimer's theoretical work during the late 1920s and through the 1930s has been unfairly dismissed as second rate. In 1927, working closely with Born, he solved a knotty problem involving calculations pertaining to subatomic particles. Oppenheimer concluded that the vibration and spin of protons could be ignored in theoretical calculations because the mass of the proton was incomparably greater than and essentially unaffected by the electron. The concept became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The next year Oppenheimer demonstrated that, when electrons were excited by a weak electric field, they could "tunnel" their way through the electrostatic forces that bound them to a nucleus. During the early 1930s Oppenheimer and his students applied the conservation laws of energy to posit the existence of a high-energy particle that complemented the electron; the positron was discovered by others in 1932. Oppenheimer's 1939 paper "On Continued Gravitational Contraction" predicted black holes, dying stars whose gravitational pull exceeded their energy production.

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Father: Julius Oppenheimer
Mother: Ella Friedman
Brother: Frank Oppenheimer (physicist, b. 14-Aug-1912, d. 3-Feb-1985)
Wife: Katherine Harrison Puening (m. Nov-1940)
Son: Peter
Daughter: Katherine

Sir Charles Algernon Parsons was an English engineer, most remembered for his invention of the steam turbine and contributions to marine engineering.

Parsons was born in 1854 in the area of Hyde Park, London, the sixth and youngest son of the astronomer and engineer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse and President of the Royal Society.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/rosse-w...#ixzz2kQrPtNQS
He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and then graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge in 1877 with a first-class mathematics degree.

Unusually for the son of an earl, he next became an apprentice at the engineering firm of W H Armstrong in Newcastle, where he was permitted to develop a steam engine at his own cost. He then joined Kitson’s in Yorkshire, working on torpedoes, followed by a position as head of the electrical equipment department with a ship engine manufacturer in Newcastle.

Fahrenheit - BiographyDaniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was born in 1686 in Germany into a family of German merchants, however, he lived most of his life in the Dutch Republic. Daniel Fahrenheit married Concordia Schumann, daughter of a well-known business family.

Daniel Gabriel met Olaus Roemer, a Danish astronomer, in Copenhagen. Roemer had invented an alcohol (wine) thermometer. Roemer's thermometer had two points, 60 degrees as the temperature of boiling water and 7 1/2 degrees as the temperature of melting ice. At that time, temperature scales were not standardized and everybody made up their own scale.
Fahrenheit modified Roemer's design and scale, and invented the new mercury themometer with a Fahrenheit scale.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the tenth son of soap maker, Josiah Franklin. Benjamin's mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of Josiah. In all, Josiah would father 17 children.

Josiah intended for Benjamin to enter into the clergy. However, Josiah could only afford to send his son to school for one year and clergymen needed years of schooling. But, as young Benjamin loved to read he had him apprenticed to his brother James, who was a printer. After helping James compose pamphlets and set type which was grueling work, 12-year-old Benjamin would sell their products in the streets.

When Benjamin was 15 his brother started The New England Courant the first "newspaper" in Boston. Though there were two papers in the city before James's Courant, they only reprinted news from abroad. James's paper carried articles, opinion pieces written by James's friends, advertisements, and news of ship schedules.

Benjamin wanted to write for the paper too, but he knew that James would never let him. After all, Benjamin was just a lowly apprentice. So Ben began writing letters at night and signing them with the name of a fictional widow, Silence Dogood. Dogood was filled with advice and very critical of the world around her, particularly concerning the issue of how women were treated. Ben would sneak the letters under the print shop door at night so no one knew who was writing the pieces. They were a smash hit, and everyone wanted to know who was the real "Silence Dogood."
After 16 letters, Ben confessed that he had been writing the letters all along. While James's friends thought Ben was quite precocious and funny, James scolded his brother and was very jealous of the attention paid to him.
Before long the Franklins found themselves at odds with Boston's powerful Puritan preachers, the Mathers. Smallpox was a deadly disease in those times, and the Mathers supported inoculation; the Franklins' believed inoculation only made people sicker. And while most Bostonians agreed with the Franklins, they did not like the way James made fun of the clergy, during the debate. Ultimately, James was thrown in jail for his views, and Benjamin was left to run the paper for several issues.
Upon release from jail, James was not grateful to Ben for keeping the paper going. Instead he kept harassing his younger brother and administering beatings from time to time. Ben could not take it and decided to run away in 1723.

Escape to Philadelphia

Running away was illegal. In early America, people all had to have a place in society and runaways did not fit in anywhere. Regardless Ben took a boat to New York where he hoped to find work as a printer. He didn't, and walked across New Jersey, finally arriving in Philadelphia via a boat ride. After debarking, he used the last of his money to buy some rolls. He was wet, disheveled, and messy when his future wife, Deborah Read, saw him on that day, October, 6, 1723. She thought him odd-looking, never dreaming that seven years later they would be married.
Franklin found work as an apprentice printer. He did so well that the governor of Pennsylvania promised to set him up in business for himself if young Franklin would just go to London to buy fonts and printing equipment. Franklin did go to London, but the governor reneged on his promise and Benjamin was forced to spend several months in England doing print work.
Benjamin had been living with the Read family before he left for London. Deborah Read, the very same girl who had seen young Benjamin arrive in Philadelphia, started talking marriage, with the young printer. But Ben did not think he was ready. While he was gone, she married another man.
Upon returning to Philadelphia, Franklin tried his hand at helping to run a shop, but soon went back to being a printer's helper. Franklin was a better printer than the man he was working for, so he borrowed some money and set himself up in the printing business. Franklin seemed to work all the time, and the citizens of Philadelphia began to notice the diligent young businessman. Soon he began getting the contract to do government jobs and started thriving in business.
In 1728, Benjamin fathered a child named William. The mother of William is not known. However, in 1730 Benjamin married his childhood sweetheart, Deborah Read. Deborah's husband had run off, and now she was able to marry.
In addition to running a print shop, the Franklins also ran their own store at this time, with Deborah selling everything from soap to fabric. Ben also ran a book store. They were quite enterprising
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Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His father, Josiah Franklin, a soap and candle maker, had 17 children, seven with first wife, Anne Child, and 10 with second wife Abiah Folger. Benjamin was his 15th child and the last son.