Video Camera Tube - Early Steps

Early Steps

In June 1908, the scientific journal Nature published a letter in which Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), discussed how a fully electronic television system could be realized by using cathode ray tubes (or "Braun" tubes, after its inventor, Karl Braun) as both imaging and display devices. He noted that the "real difficulties lie in devising an efficient transmitter", and that it was possible that "no photoelectric phenomenon at present known will provide what is required". A cathode ray tube was successfully demonstrated as a displaying device by the German Professor Max Dieckmann in 1906, his experimental results were published by the journal Scientific American in 1909. Campbell-Swinton later expanded on his vision in a presidential address given to the Röntgen Society in November 1911. The photoelectric screen in the proposed transmitting device was a mosaic of isolated rubidium cubes. His concept for a fully electronic television system was later popularized by Hugo Gernsback as the "Campbell-Swinton Electronic Scanning System" in the August 1915 issue of the popular magazine Electrical Experimenter.

In a letter to Nature published in October 1926, Campbell-Swinton also announced the results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with G. M. Minchin and J. C. M. Stanton. They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam. These experiments were conducted before March 1914, when Minchin died, but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by H. Miller and J. W. Strange from EMI, and by H. Iams and A. Rose from RCA. Both teams succeeded in transmitting "very faint" images with the original Campbell-Swinton's selenium-coated plate, but much better images were obtained when the metal plate was covered with zinc sulphide or selenide, or with aluminum or zirconium oxide treated with caesium. These experiments are the base of the future vidicon. A description of a CRT imaging device also appeared in a patent application filed by Edvard-Gustav Schoultz in France in August 1921, and published in 1922, although a working device was not demonstrated until some years later.