A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DPaul Gottlieb Nipkow : 1860 - 1940
In 1884, university student Paul Nipkow of Germany proposed and patented the world's first electromechanical television system. Nipkow proposed a disc camera, that contained a disc which was perforated. To capture a moving image the disc was rotated before an image and had the effect of dividing the picture into lines. Light sensitive selenium behind the perforated disk would capture the moving image. The camera became known as the Nipkow Disk. The Nipkow disk was a mechanical scanning system and became the best known for its time. Nipkow could not build a working system. He could not amplify the electric current created by the selenium to drive a receiver. It was not until 1907 and the development of an amplification tube that serious development in mechanical television would start
Engineer and inventor, born in Lauenburg, Germany. One of the pioneers of television, Paul Gottlieb Nipkow invented the Nipkow Disk in 1884, a mechanical scanning device consisting of a revolving disc with a spiral pattern of apertures. In use until 1932, it was superseded by electronic scanning.
Paul Gottlieb Nipkow (b. Aug. 22, 1860, Lauenburg, Pomerania [Germany] d. Aug. 24, 1940, Berlin, Ger.), German engineer who discovered television's scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analyzed and transmitted. Nipkow's invention in 1884 of a rotating disk (Nipkow disk) with one or more spirals of apertures that passed successively across the picture made a mechanical television system possible. The Nipkow disk was supplanted in 1934 by electronic scanning devices.
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