A zeppelin over Berlin before World War I.
Zaharoff, Sir Basil (1849–1936)
An arms dealer and financier during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Basil Zaharoff became famous for his work for Vickers munitions from 1897 until 1927. He was later denounced as a “merchant of death,” and the British member of Parliament, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Guinness, called him the “mystery man of Europe.”
The exact origins of Zaharoff are not known for certain, but his date of birth is regularly cited as being October 6, 1849. It is believed that he was born in the Turkish town of Mug˘ la, his family being Greek, and he fled to Russia after the attacks on Greeks in 1821. He grew up in Constantinople and later said he learned so many languages by being a guide for tourists, although biographer Robert Neumann did cast adverse comment on the city and its attractions for tourists at the time. At least one of his family worked in the Constantinople Fire Brigade, but after a large fire in the city in the late 1860s, he had to flee the city for London after the fire brigade was variously accused of doing very little and extorting money from people whose houses were in danger, and also from some quarters, he was accused of having started the fire.
The first record of Basil Zaharoff being in London was when he was entwined in a court case in which he was fined £100. He later became a friend of Etienne Skouloudis, who introduced him to the arms manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt. He started work with them in October 1877 at a time when the Ottoman Empire and Russia were both rearming, and there was also much need for weapons in the Balkans as the newly emerging countries of Bulgaria and Romania, and later Serbia, were keen to arm themselves.
Zaharoff was soon accused of using corrupt business practices, including selling weapons to both sides in a particular conflict. There were also allegations of fake or faulty weapons. Zaharoff’s major break came when he became a salesman for Hiram Maxim’s new Maxim gun. This made Zaharoff extremely wealthy through making large commissions on sales of the guns, and more especially the ammunition. He was also involved in attempts to sell a faulty submarine initially to the Greeks and then to the Turks, and finally to the Russians. They were based on the designs of the Spanish inventor Isaac Peral. Even during sea trials these submarines did not work, but Zaharoff managed to sell the submarines. He was then involved in selling munitions for Vickers.
The outbreak of World War I saw Zaharoff’s business interests expand considerably, with him by this time owning the Union Parisienne Bank. In 1914 he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour by Raymond Poincaré, and during the war itself, Vickers manufactured four ships of the line, three cruisers, fifty-three submarines, sixty-two light vessels, ninety thousand mines, twenty-two thousand torpedoes, 5,500 plans, and some one hundred thousand machine guns.
As well as selling weapons, Zaharoff was influential in Greece, and the British government wanted the Greeks to join the war on the Allied side. King Constantine I of Greece was the brother-in-law to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, so Zaharoff helped in the financing of a political coup in which the pro-Allied prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, took over the running of the country. After the war, expecting Allied help and at the urging of Zaharoff, Venizelos took part in an attack on the Turkish mainland. This failed.
The other state to which Zaharoff was closely connected was Monaco. Basil Zaharoff had helped Prince Louis II of Monaco purchase the Société des Bains de Mer, which ran the casino at Monte Carlo. Zaharoff managed to ensure that Monaco’s independence was guaranteed in the Treaty of Versailles. Zaharoff ended up living in Monte Carlo and died there on November 27, 1936.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Allfrey, Anthony. Man of Arms: the Life and Legend of Sir Basil Zaharoff. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.
Lewinsohn, Sir Richard. The Man Behind the Scenes: The Career of Sir Basil Zaharoff, “The Mystery Man of Europe.” London: Gollancz, 1929.
McCormick, Donald. Peddler of Death: The Life and Times of Sir Basil Zaharoff. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
Neumann, Robert. Zaharoff the Armaments King. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935.
This Japanese term is used to refer to industrial and financial business conglomerates that emerged after the Meiji Restoration and that dominated Japan from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, when they were broken up on orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who saw them as a part of the military-industrial complex that had helped cause the Pacific War.
The word zaibatsu literally means “financial clique” or “plutocrats,” and it was first used from the time of World War I to describe the major business conglomerates, but especially the Big Four. These were Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, all of which predated the war. While Mitsui and Sumitomo actually dated from the earlier Edo (or Tokugawa) period, Mitsubishi and Yasuda both came into being during the Meiji Restoration. By the 1910s and the 1920s these conglomerates were involved in manufacturing industry and foreign trade, and they were being used by the Japanese government for military procurement and even tax collection.
Although the Big Four were the most influential and powerful, below the Big Four were other companies such as the Furukawa, the Nakajima, and the Okura groups. Although some of them included joint stock companies, with ordinary shareholders, the key parts of each business were directly owned by a relatively small group of people. This was because the groups were structured so that there was a range of businesses, and at the top of them was a holding company that was controlled by the family and relatives of the founders. Most of the zaibatsu also had a banking company that was used to finance expansion and easily secure lines of credit.
All the companies took part in the industrialization of Japan following the Meiji Restoration, and during the Russo-Japanese War they were awarded all the major military contracts. As a result, many of them were able to expand into China and Korea. And starting from the general election of 1890, many of them also came to be closely associated with specific political parties or factions. This Mitsubishi group became closely connected with the Rikken Minseito Party and also the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the Mitsui group became more closely associated with the Rikken Seiyukai Party and the Imperial Japanese Army.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and their later invasion of China, opened up many new opportunities for these companies. All were involved in securing lucrative Japanese government contracts for the war effort, and most of them also were connected with the looting of Chinese industry, with many establishing factories in Manchuria (Manchukuo) or Occupied China, where they continued production for the war effort. This industrial expansion saw the emergence of a few new companies such as Nissan, which were not controlled by a single family but did operate in the same manner. By the late 1930s, Kawasaki, Nomura, and others were also important.
Essentially these zaibatsu operated as did the military-industrial complex in other countries. However, for Japan it was the small number of these companies, and the direct connection of most of them with political power, that made them so essential in the Japanese war effort. They were seen as being often the motivating forces behind some of the politicians who supported the war in Manchuria and then war with China. They were also later found to have been those who backed General Hideki Tojo, the prime minister of Japan from 1941 until 1944, who, as a cabinet minister, had urged the government to embark on the invasion of Southeast Asia and the Pacific War. These companies were quick to profit from the war in not only the arming of the Japanese military but also in establishing themselves or subsidiaries throughout Southeast Asia.
During the Allied occupation of the country after its surrender in 1945, General Douglas MacArthur recognized the importance of the zaibatsu in the Pacific War, and as a result when he was appointed as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan in 1945, he saw one of his major roles as the destruction of them. On the one hand, he knew of the employment these companies provided, and that manufacturing industry was going to be crucial to the rebuilding of Japan, but their very close role in fueling the support for the Japanese war effort meant that he was determined to break them up. The idea was to ensure that Japan never reached a similar position of economic concentration again.
Many of MacArthur’s U.S. staff had served in or with the U.S. government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they had experienced the New Deal. They viewed the monopolistic behavior of the zaibatsu as anticompetitive, and therefore also a bad influence from an economic point of view. The result was that the U.S. occupation administration, the SCAP, targeted sixteen zaibatsu to be completely dissolved in 1946 to 1947, overseen by the Holding Company Liquidation Commission. This process started in 1946 with sixteen conglomerates being targeted. And to ensure that the zaibatsu did not reemerge afterward, in December 1947, the Elimination of Excessive Concentration of Economic Power Law and the Law for the Termination of Zaibatsu Family Control were promulgated. The second of these laws ensured that any zaibatsu family member who held a position in a zaibatsu-designated company, subsidiary, or any affiliate had to resign their position in thirty days and be excluded from returning to that group for the next ten years. The Holding Company Liquidation Commission was later to work through 325 companies and review all of them. In May 1948 it announced that 194 of the companies would be exempted, later adding another thirty-one to the list exempt.
Some of the zaibatsu were able to regroup, but they never had the combination of economic and political influence that they previously wielded. None were still totally controlled by a single family, and this has been highlighted as one of the major reasons for the rapid economic improvement of Japan, but also why militarism has not been a significant factor in Japanese politics since 1945.
See also: Capitalism.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Alletzhauser, Albert J. The House of Nomura. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Allinson, Gary D. Japan’s Postwar History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Caves, Richard E., and Masu Uekusa. Industrial Organization in Japan. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976.
Cohen, Jerome B. Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949.
Yoshihara, Kunio. Sogo Shosha: The Vanguard of the Japanese Economy. Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Yoshino, Michael Y., and Thomas B. Lifson. The Invisible Link: Japan’s Sogo Shosha and the Organization of Trade. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986.
Zeppelin, Ferdinand von (1838–1917)
The founder of the Zeppelin Airship Company, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin was a general in the German army before moving into the manufacture of aircraft and then airships. These changed the nature of transport in the 1920s, after his death, but with a number of airship disasters, especially the crashing of the Hindenburg in 1937, interest in airships declined considerably.
Born on July 8, 1838, at Konstanz, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s father, Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf von Zeppelin, was a government minister in the state of Württemberg, and his mother was the daughter of French refugees. He lived for most of his life at the family’s Giorsberg Manor, near Constance, and was educated at home by tutors. At the age of fifteen he went to the Stuttgart Polytechnic, and two years later he enlisted as an army cadet, planning to devote his career to being an army officer for Württemberg, then a separate country. In 1859, with Prussia about to be involved in the Franco-Austrian War, Württemberg (as an Austrian ally) mobilized its forces. However, fighting ended before Prussia was able to intervene.
Ferdinand von Zeppelin then went to the United States, where he became an observer in the Union forces for the Army of the Potomac, and he was also involved in an expedition for the source of the Mississippi River. It was at that time that Zeppelin traveled in a balloon designed by John Steiner. Returning to Württemberg, Zeppelin became an adjutant for the king and served in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and four years later in the Franco-Prussian War, where he was involved in reconnaissance. He then joined the cavalry, and with the creation of the empire of Germany, he was the envoy of Württemberg in Berlin, the new capital. Rising to the rank of commander, he retired in 1890.
After having been in a balloon in the United States, Zeppelin had not been allowed into a military balloon. But in a civilian flight he recognized their potential and returned to North America in 1869 to study their design. His interest was in having balloons that could be guided with an engine, and with France starting to develop them, he wanted Germany to do so as well. This opportunity came when he retired from the military, and with the engineer Theodor Gross, he tested out air propellers and the manufacture of purer forms of hydrogen. The first plans were unsuccessful because the engines were incapable of powering a balloon against a contrary wind current.
The French continued with the design of airships, and Zeppelin persisted. With a new engineer, Theodor Kober, he came up with a new design and patented this in August 1895, describing it as an “airship train.” With a much more powerful engine and ways of reducing wind resistance by transforming the shape of the balloon, he was also able to make use of aluminum, which was now much cheaper because of the work of Charles Martin Hall. Joining with other industrialists, including Gottlieb Daimler, the company Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt was formed as a joint-stock company, with Zeppelin owning 52.5 percent of the stock, having invested 441,000 Marks. The capital was used to build a shed on Lake Konstanz at Manzell, where the first Zeppelin airship was built. There Eugen Wolf, Baron Bassus, Ludwg Dürr, and Gross, a mechanic from Lake Konstanz, worked on constructing the first Zeppelin, the L.Z. 1. When it flew for the first time, the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper did not consider it important enough to send down a reporter.
The final successful design of the Zeppelin airship was said to have owed much to the work by David Schwarz, but many of the airship designs were new. In 1908 the Zeppelin LZ4 crashed at Echterdingen, and 6.5 million German Marks were raised from a public subscription that established a new company called Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin GmbH, and the manufacture of Zeppelins increased. By 1914 it was calculated that Zeppelins had been involved in the transportation of 37,250 people in some 1,600 flights. To popularize the Zeppelins and also to raise money, many were involved in carrying mail—some actual letters, and others with philatelic covers.
During World War I, the Zeppelins were used in air attacks on London and other parts of Britain, with one being equipped to help the beleaguered Germans in East Africa (now Tanzania). In one famous incident, the Zeppelin was illuminated by searchlights over Central London. After one Zeppelin was shot down, one of the crew was taken as a prisoner of war, the pilot’s story appearing in the London newspaper, Morning Post. The main problem the crew found was that when they reached twenty-five thousand feet, they had problems dealing with oxygen. Count von Zeppelin died on March 8, 1917, while the outcome of the war was still undecided. At the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles forced the closure of the Zeppelin project, although it was later restarted by Hugo Eckener.
See also: Aerospace Industry; Patents.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Dick, Harold G., and Douglas H. Robinson. The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships—Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985.
Eckener, Hugo. Count Zeppelin: The Man and His Work. London: Massie Publishing Company, 1938.
Lehmann, Ernst A., and Howard Mingos. The Zeppelins: The Development of the Airship. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927.
Syon, Guillaume de. Zeppelin!: Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
A well-known Chinese social reformer, Zhang Jian (Chang Ch’ien) was an industrial entrepreneur and politician in early twentieth-century China. Although he rose to prominence as a court official and then as a businessman, he played a key role in urging the Chinese Imperial Court to reform and accept a written constitution during the 1900s, and then came to accept the inevitability of the Republic, although he was unsure about the possible results of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 to 1912.
A zeppelin over Berlin before World War I.
He was born on July 1, 1853, at Haimen, Jiangsu (Kiangsu) Province, on the southeastern coast of China, and he received a traditional education in the Confucian classics, becoming heavily influenced by Confucianism. He graduated at the top of his class from the Hanlin Academy in Beijing (Peking). In 1894 he reached the senior level in the civil service examination. However, in the following year, China went to war with Japan. The Sino-Japanese War saw China quickly defeated, and Zhang retired from office. He returned to Jiangsu, where he decided to devote his energy to developing industry there with the aim of making it an example for modernization that might be replicated on a larger scale in the whole of China. The Australian newspaper correspondent, George E. Morrison, from the British paper The Times in November 1911, called him “the man who organised a great industrial and agricultural development association in Manchuria. He is a wealthy man, a real pioneer of industry, who has the further distinction of being the Optimus of his year.”
Zhang received government help and tax relief to help him build the Dah Sun Cotton Mill, which was the only privately owned mill in China that operated at a profit. Zhang then expanded his business and established a flourmill, an oil mill, shipping lines, a distillery, and also a machine ship. Zhang was concerned about helping his workers in a paternalistic and Confucian way, and he built many amenities for his workers, including schools for their children, access roads, parks, orphanages, medical clinics, a library, and a home for aged and retired workers. In 1901 Zhang wrote a paper, Pien-fa p’ing-i (“A Calm Discourse on Reform”), which argued that China should adopt a parliamentary system to help modernization.
In 1903 Zhang visited Japan and quickly formulated even more ideas and became a more ardent supporter of constitutionalism. By this time he was an acknowledged scholar. He urged many senior officials to adopt some reforms to save the Chinese monarchy, arguing with Zhang Zhidong (Chang Chih-tung) and Yuan Shikai (Yuan Shih-k’ai). In 1904 he published a Chinese translation, annotated with his comments, of the Meiji Constitution introduced in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. In 1905 Zhang supported the sending of a constitutional mission overseas to investigate how foreign constitutions operated. It led Zhang to write a book on the constitutional history of Japan to alert the Chinese as to how an imperial system and a parliamentary one could operate at the same time. The Association to Prepare for the Establishment of Constitutional Government in 1905 petitioned the Imperial government arguing the case. In 1909 Zhang was elected president of the Provincial Assembly of Kiangsu.
After the start of the Chinese Revolution in October 1911, Zhang opposed the revolutionaries and argued, in a Confucian manner, that change should come from the government. He was in Hankou (Hankow) on the day the revolution broke out elsewhere in the city, but rather than follow events, he quickly returned to Jiangsu. He still felt that the Imperial government could concede ground and refused to join the new Constitutionalist Friends’ Club that had been formed. Instead, he wrote to T’ieh-liang, the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Manchu forces at Nanking, urging him to march on the rebels in Hankou and put down the rebellion. After meeting with Ch’eng Te-ch’uan, the governor of the province of Su-chou (Soochow), he felt that the immediate convening of a parliament could prevent the revolution from succeeding.
On December 23, 1911, Zhang changed his view and proclaimed that he supported the Chinese Republic. He cut off the queue in his hair and wrote about the great promise that could be achieved by the formation of a Republic. Zhang was appointed as Minister of Agriculture and Trade in the new government. However, as a man from southern China, he resented the influence of northerners, and he briefly opposed Yuan Shikai, who was from the north. However, Yuan managed to ease out Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) and move himself into the position of president in 1912. Zhang then refused to serve under Yuan, although eventually he came to accept that he was probably the best person to rule China in order to prevent a further outbreak of fighting. He died on August 24, 1926, at Nant’ung, Jiangsu.
See also: Bank of China; Shanghai, China.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Chu, Samuel C., and Ch’ang-ling Chu. Reformer in Modern China: Chang Chien, 1853–1926. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Lo Hu-Min. The Correspondence of G. E. Morrison, 1895–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Wang, Y. C. Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.
Wright, Mary Clabaugh. China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
Émile Zola was an influential novelist, journalist, and political activist who helped develop the Naturalist movement in French literature and push for greater political liberalization in France. Most of Zola’s literary works are part of a series of twenty novels known collectively as Les Rougon-Macquart, which follow the lives of members of an extended French family during the Second Empire (1852–1870) under Emperor Napoléon III. Zola believed that he dissected society scientifically through his works, revealing the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, such as the immorality of consumerism and the indifference of the bourgeoisie, alcoholism, prostitution, violence, and the exploitation of labor. Consequently, many of his novels were considered controversial during his lifetime.
Zola was born in Paris to François Zola, an Italian engineer who had immigrated to France, and Emilie Aubert in 1840. In 1843, the family moved to southeastern France. Zola’s father died when the boy was just seven, and the family found it difficult to survive. In 1858, Zola and his mother moved to Paris. Zola’s mother planned a law career for him, but he failed the baccalaureate examination. Before gaining fame as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk for a shipping firm and then in the sales department of the publishing house of Louis-Christophe-François Hachette. He also wrote literary columns. Zola rose to prominence following the publication of his sordid novels La Confession de Claude (1865) and Thérèse Raquin (1867), which caused a scandal due to their sexual content and criticism of conservative bourgeois morals. Zola’s work came to be influenced by the artistic movements of his era, including Impressionism and Surrealism.
Zola was influenced by the intellectual and scientific ideas of the age of the Industrial Revolution, attempting to manipulate scientific principles to the process of observing society and representing it through interpretation in fiction. He crafted each novel meticulously, using a process that combined detailed documentation, imagination, and accurate portrayals based on research. Zola interviewed experts, workers, and people familiar with what he wished to write about, documenting his findings to create detailed, thoughtful, and natural portraits of his protagonists and their world.
To Zola, who became an advocate of socialism, the Industrial Revolution had given birth to a new world, seemingly marked by tremendous progress but in reality on the verge of social dysfunction. Capitalism had emerged as an unscrupulous force for profit at the expense of humanity. Corporations evinced little regard for their workers’ safety or health, exploiting them to receive the maximum amount of labor for the least amount of pay. Therefore, the wealth of the bourgeoisie, which fostered consumerism, and that of corporations was based on the exploitation of the working classes. Zola perceived the bourgeoisie as largely indifferent to the plight of the working class. Workers lived a subhuman existence, toiling under wretched conditions. Many needed supplements from charity organizations for subsistence.
Zola perceived that the resulting environment negatively influenced the lives of the working classes. Given what he saw as the overwhelming nature of social constraints, Zola placed little value on individual freedom. Rather, he believed that an individual’s heredity and environment effectively determined their actions. As a result, Zola argued, the industrial development itself was responsible for social ills such as crime, prostitution, and depression. Apparent progress had become degeneration of the human condition. Such ideas placed Zola firmly in the more radical camp of the emerging sociology of his day.
Zola’s great opus, Les Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871–1893), chronicles the natural and social history of members of two branches of the same family: the respectable Rougons, who were shopkeepers and members of the lower middle class, and the disreputable Macquarts, who were laborers, thieves, and alcoholics. The story spans all levels of society. Reflecting Zola’s views on the conditions created by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, some members of the family rise to elite society, while others fall as victims of social evils and heredity. Throughout, Zola works to demolish the idea of individual human rationality and the promise of a well-ordered market capitalism that can guarantee social justice. The most significant novels within the cycle include L’Assomior (1877), detailing the Parisian working class’ suffering; Nana (1880), concerning prostitution; and Germinal (1885), which depicts the coal mining industry.
Critics agree that Germinal, the thirteenth novel of Les Rougon-Macquart, is Zola’s greatest work. It details a seemingly fruitless miners’ strike in northern France. The story centers around the character of Étienne Lantier, who arrives in the coal-mining town of Montsou after being fired for assaulting his superior. While there, he befriends veteran miner Maheu. Lantier is an idealist filled with socialist rhetoric. He rallies the miners into a strike by awakening their deep-seated anger at their exploitation. Like many earlier social novels, especially those of Charles Dickens, Germinal protested against the inhumane working conditions common in the factory system and mines during the nineteenth century in Europe. Unlike such milder reformists as Dickens, however, Zola did not hesitate to invoke political revolution as the natural consequence of his work. The very title Germinal refers to the name of one of the spring months used as part of the French Revolutionary calendar proclaimed in 1791 as a means of obliterating the oppressive past. Zola invoked the memory of that earlier revolution to imply the threat of contemporary revolution should the bourgeoisie continue to exploit the workers.
In 1898, Zola risked his career to publish an article titled “J’Accuse” (“I Accuse”) in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer who was falsely convicted on espionage charges in 1894 based on limited evidence. Zola accused the military and government of anti-Semitism and of railroading Dreyfus. The case, known as the Dreyfus Affair, had sharply divided France between conservative and liberal factions during the 1890s. The government tried and convicted Zola of criminal libel in 1899. To avoid jail, Zola fled to Great Britain. Eventually the government case collapsed. Dreyfus received a pardon (rather than an actual exoneration) in 1899, and Zola was allowed to return to France.
Émile Zola, a photograph autographed to Alred Dreyfus.
On September 29, 1902, Zola died in Paris of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney. He was initially buried in Montmartre Cemetery, but in 1908 during the premiership of the radical Georges Clemenceau, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon, a burial site reserved for the greatest citizens of France.
See also: Marxism.
—Eric Martone
Further Reading
Gallois, William. Zola: The History of Capitalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Kamm, Lewis. The Object in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart. Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1978.
Patterson, J. G. A Zola Dictionary: The Characters of the Rougon-Macquart Novels of Emile Zola. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1912.
Petrey, Sandy. Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendahl, Zola and the Performances of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma (1889–1982)
Vladimir Kosma Zworykin was one of the two coinventors of the all-electronic Television, along with Philo Taylor Farnsworth. Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, on July 30, 1889, the youngest of the seven surviving children of Kosma and Elana Zworykin. His family were wealthy merchants and able to give him an excellent education. Even before he was sent to school, he learned to read and write from a private tutor. He soon developed a strong scientific bent and would never lose his appetite for learning throughout his long life. After completing his secondary education, he was admitted to the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, a highly competitive engineering school. There he became a student of Boris Rosing, who was using cathode ray tubes to display primitive geometric designs at a time when the few other inventors even discussing television were thinking in terms of mechanical scanning. Zworykin’s curiosity was quickly piqued, and the concept of transmitting a complex image by electronic means became a driving ambition. However, World War I (1914–1918) and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution interrupted his efforts. In the eyes of the new Soviet government, he was a member of the hated bourgeoisie, a class enemy to be confined to the lowliest of positions and treated as perpetually suspect. In 1919, he fled to the United States, where he hoped to find safety from class enmity and opportunities to continue his research into television. After some initial struggling he found a position as a research engineer with Westinghouse, which had been a leader in the development of the modern power grid around the turn of the twentieth century. Although he did work for them and wrote a paper on the potential of television technology, the executives at Westinghouse showed little interest.
Meanwhile, numerous other inventors, including John Logie Baird of Scotland and C. F. Jenkins of the United States, were having limited success with various forms of mechanically scanned television systems. Baird was able to produce experimental broadcasts using a BBC transmitter and his forty-line mechanical apparatus, although the images were the size of postage stamps and generally blurry. All this work had not gone unnoticed at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which was busily making the 1920s the Golden Age of Radio. RCA’s executive director, David Sarnoff, had originally conceived of the idea of broadcast radio as an entertainment medium when most radio executives were thinking in terms of wireless telegraphy. However, Sarnoff also knew he had to continue producing innovations to keep RCA in its leading position in electronics. By 1928 Sarnoff had brought Zworykin to RCA, where he was given ample funds to develop his camera tube design, which he called an iconoscope. He also developed a receiver tube, the kinetescope, to create a fully electronic television system, however, realizing his system in practical form proved fraught with difficulties. By this time, Philo T. Farnsworth had been experiencing notable success with his image dissector camera tube and oscillate receiver tube in his San Francisco laboratory. Zworykin paid Farnsworth a visit in April 1930. The younger inventor, flattered by the interest, showed Zworykin around freely. When Farnsworth’s financial backers discovered the visit, they were horrified and demanded a full accounting of everything said and demonstrated during the visit. Subsequently there would be acrimonious accusations of theft of intellectual property.
Zworykin’s team at RCA did subsequently build their own tube based upon Farnsworth’s work and used things they learned from it to improve the iconoscope. However, the situation was further clouded by the simple fact that the wealthy and powerful David Sarnoff could bring the entire resources of RCA to bear in a patent infringement fight, far more than Farnsworth could hope to muster. As a result of these court battles, the commercial realization of television was delayed throughout the 1930s, only to be interrupted by World War II and the total devotion of America’s industrial capacity to the war effort. After the war, television appeared to burst upon the scene fully, and neither Zworykin nor Farnsworth received widespread public recognition for their contributions. Television was often portrayed as the result of a team effort by RCA employees.
As television made the transition from laboratory to commercial product, Zworykin became increasingly disenchanted with the applications to which it was being put. He refused to own a set, so low did he find the intellectual content of most programming, and when asked what part of his invention he was most proud of, he answered, “the switch.” Puzzled, the interviewer asked him to clarify, and he explained he meant the switch that turned it off. Disappointed as he might have been with the uses to which his invention had been put, Zworykin did not turn his back on inventing. Instead, he turned his interests toward related technologies, particularly the development of the electron microscope. Its contributions to science gave him far more reason to be proud than the endless stream of mediocrity he saw prancing across the screens whenever he had the misfortune to pass an electronics store.
As a Russian immigrant working in sensitive areas of science and technology during the Cold War, Zworykin had to fend off accusations of disloyalty, particularly during the Red Scare period of the 1950s. However, he was able to show that as a scion of a wealthy merchant family he could have had no place in the Soviet system, and in fact had fled to America to avoid being murdered as a class enemy. By the late 1960s, Zworykin retired from RCA, although he often expressed frustration at no longer being able to work actively. However, he received a steady stream of honors and awards from the scientific community, acknowledging his life of contributions. Zworykin died on July 29, 1982, just one day before his ninety-third birthday.
See also: Great Britain; Transistor; Vacuum Tubes; Westinghouse, George.
—Leigh Kimmel
Further Reading
Abramson, Albert. Zworykin, Pioneer of Television. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Dreher, Carl. Sarnoff: An American Success. New York: Quadrangle, 1977.
Fisher, David E., and Marshall Jon Fisher. Tube: The Invention of Television. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996.
Leinwoll, Stanley. From Spark to Satellite: A History of Radio Communication. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.
Sobel, Robert. RCA. New York: Stein and Day, 1986.