A Scottish electrical engineer publishes a brief letter in the journal Nature describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. But it will take forty years before the well-delineated concept finally achieves commercial success.
Think twice before you throw away the silly idea you scribbled on a bar napkin: many an invention was born on a piece of paper.
Edinburgh-born Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton made his concepts public in the 1908 letter and again three years later in a lecture to the Roentgen (see here) Society of London. He described using cathode-ray tubes to capture and display imagery. An electron gun in the neck of the cathode-ray tube would shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Sweeping the electron stream back and forth in rows from top to bottom, Campbell-Swinton proposed, would display a moving image on a flat screen.
Many inventors in the early twentieth century filed patents for technologies that would eventually make their way into the television, but Campbell-Swinton’s concept was central because he proposed a modification of the cathode-ray tube that let it be used as both a transmitter and receiver of light. Campbell-Swinton didn’t know how to actually make his television work. Inventors Kalman Tihanyi, Philo T. Farnsworth, John Logie Baird, Vladimir Zworykin (see here), and Allen DuMont all built on Campbell-Swinton’s ideas to devise the first working televisions.
Progress was slowed by World War I and the Great Depression. The first practical consumer TV receivers were a hit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 (see here). Then World War II intervened, and it was only after the war that Campbell-Swinton’s vision blossomed into a mass medium.
He was not around to see it. Campbell-Swinton died in 1930.—BXC