Paul gottlieb nipkow wikipedia

German electrical engineer and inventor (1860–1940)

Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow (German:[ˈpaʊlˈgɔtliːpˈnɪpkɔv]; 22 August 1860 – 24 August 1940) was a German electrical engineer and inventor. He invented the Nipkow disk, which laid the foundation of television, since his disk was a fundamental component in the first televisions. Hundreds of stations experimented with television broadcasting using his disk in the 1920s and 1930s, until it was superseded by all-electronic systems in the 1940s.

Nipkow has been called the "father of television", together with other early figures of television history like Karl Ferdinand Braun.

The first regular television service in the world, Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, was named in his honour.

Beginnings

Nipkow was born in Lauenburg (now Lębork) in the Prussianprovince of Pomerania, now part of Poland. While at school in neighbouring Neustadt (now Wejherowo), in the province of West Prussia, Nipkow experimented in telephony and the transmission of moving pictures. After graduation, he went to Berlin in order to study science. He studied physiological optics with Hermann von Helmholtz, and electro-physics with Adolf Slaby.

Nipkow disk

While still a student he conceived an "electric telescope", mainly known for the idea of using a spiral-perforated disk (Nipkow disk), to divide a picture into a linear sequence of points. Accounts of its invention state that the idea came to him while sitting alone at home with an oil lamp on Christmas Eve, 1883. Alexander Bain had transmitted images telegraphically in the 1840s but the Nipkow disk improved the encoding process.

He applied to the imperial patent office in Berlin for a patent covering an "electric telescope" for the "electric reproduction of illuminating objects", in the category "electric apparatuses". This was granted on 15 January 1885, retroactive to 6 January 1884. It is not kn

First regular television service in the world

The Fernsehsender "Paul Nipkow" (TV Station Paul Nipkow) , also known as Deutscher Fernseh-Rundfunk (German Television Broadcasting), in Berlin, Germany, was the first regular television service in the world. It was on the air from 22 March 1935, until it was shut down in 1944. The station was named after Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, the inventor of the Nipkow disk.

History

Parallel to the experiments by John Logie Baird in the United Kingdom, by Herbert E. Ives and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States, as well as by Kenjiro Takayanagi in Japan, television pioneers like Dénes Mihály and Manfred von Ardenne had organised experimental television transmissions in Berlin since 1928. In the same year, Telefunken presented a television set prototype during the Internationale Funkausstellung industrial exhibition. From 1929 television test programs were regularly aired from the Funkturm Berlin transmitter (Rundfunksender Witzleben). The first public transmission was introduced in the Kroll Opera House on 18 April 1934.

At first the station could only be received in and around Berlin, later also in other German cities via special Reichspost long distance cables. It became very popular when it covered the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. About 160,000 viewers saw the Olympic games on a few private televisions and in many public television parlours. Television was used more for mainstream entertainment rather than propaganda, as Joseph Goebbels preferred radio as a mass-medium. The heavy and slow equipment made it difficult to report, and almost all programming was broadcast live. From 1942 to 1944, the Germans also restarted a TV station in Paris to broadcast programs in German and French. In 1944, the station was shut down, as were most other cultural events, as a consequence of the approach of the Allied Armies in t

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Image scanning device

A Nipkow disk (sometimes Anglicized as Nipkov disk; patented in 1884), also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in Berlin. This scanning disk was a fundamental component in mechanical television, and thus the first televisions, through the 1920s and 1930s.

Operation

The device is a mechanically spinning disk of any suitable material (metal, plastic, cardboard, etc.), with a series of equally-distanced circular holes of equal diameter drilled in it. The holes may also be square for greater precision. These holes are positioned to form a single-turn spiral starting from an external radial point of the disk and proceeding to the center of the disk. When the disk rotates, the holes trace circular ring patterns, with inner and outer diameter depending on each hole's position on the disk and thickness equal to each hole's diameter. The patterns may or may not partially overlap, depending on the exact construction of the disk. A lens projects an image of the scene in front of it directly onto the disk. Each hole in the spiral takes a "slice" through the image which is picked up as a temporal pattern of light and dark by a sensor. If the sensor is made to control a light behind a second Nipkow disk rotating synchronously at the same speed and in the same direction, the image will be reproduced line-by-line. The size of the reproduced image is again determined by the size of the disc; a larger disc produces a larger image.

When spinning the disk while observing an object "through" the disk, preferably through a relatively small circular sector of the disk (the viewport), for example, an angular quarter or eighth of the disk, the object seems "scanned" line by line, first by length or height or even diagonally, depending on the exact sector chosen for observation. By spinning the disk rapidly