There are quite a few people who’ve been called the “father of television” and the “inventor of television.” That’s because television isn’t a thing — over the years, it’s been many different things. And Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow is the father of it all. Just kidding — Nipkow is one of the people who invented something key to a form of television, and he’s one of the people who’s been called the “father of television.” But what he invented doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with what we think of as “television,” and as we’ll see, he was pretty much an absentee father.
Paul Nipkow was born August 22, 1860 in Lauenburg, a town that at the time was in the Kingdom of Prussia (it’s now in Poland, and known as Lębork). He did his first experiments in signal transmission — both in telephony and how transmitting moving pictures might work — while he was still in elementary school. Later he went to Berlin to study optics and electro-physics.
He was still in University when he had the idea of transmitting images as a series of points. He surmised that you could encode a picture into such a sequence by using a spinning disk that was perforated in a spiral pattern. This was not an entirely original idea, because Alexander Bain had transmitted images via telegraph in the 1840s. But Nipkow’s disk idea was a much better encoding system. He received a patent for his “electric microscope” in 1885. But he never actually built a working device; everybody (including Nipkow himself) seemed to simply lose interest in the idea, and the patent lapsed. He became a designer in Berlin, and didn’t do any further work on anything to do with image transmission.
However, in 1928 Nipkow attended a radio show in Berlin and saw a display by the Telefunken company — he described his experience: “The televisions stood in dark cells. Hundreds stood and waited patiently for the moment at which they would see television for the first time. I waited among them, growing ever more nervous. Now for the first time, I would see what I had devised 45 years ago. Finally, I reached the front row; a dark cloth was pushed to the side, and I saw before me a flickering image, not easy to discern.”
This time everybody was interested in image transmission, and by the early 1930s the scanning systems were based on electronic scanning. Nipkow’s mechanical system wasn’t needed. But Nipkow himself wasn’t forgotten. The first scheduled television service in the world was in Berlin, and it was named Fersehsender Paul Nipkow in his honor. He was named the honorary president of the television council of the Imperial Broadcasting Chamber in Germany. Those were the days of the rise of the Nazi party, and Nipkow’s work was touted in their propaganda as an example of the superiority of German intellect; they’d invented television decades before anyone else! As far as we know, though, Nipkow didn’t take part in most of it. After all, but then he was in his late 70s, hadn’t worked on anything related to television in his whole career, and may have been somewhat bemused by the whole affair. This father of television was never much involved with that particular child. He didn’t live to see television become enormously popular, either; he passed away in Berlin when he was 80.
