Paul Nipkow Credit: invent.org

Paul Nipkow was born on August, 22th 1860 in Lauenburg, Germany.
HE was a German physicist and television pioneer.
In December 1883 he fact that he had devised a way to send pictures.A substance called selenium lets more electricity pass through it in bright light than in dark. Knowing this, he tried to convert a picture into an electrical signal.

Knowing that all the things we see are different shades of light and dark, he had to find some way to break up an image, such as a photograph, into points of light and dark.
These could then be changed into electrical signals by cells made of selenium. This current produced by the cells would vary with the brightness of the image. The brighter the light the stronger the electrical signal.

In 1884, he applied for a patent for his image scanning system: it was to use a rotating disk with a series of holes arranged in a spiral, each spaced from the next by the width of the image; a beam of light shining through the holes would illuminate each line of the image.

The light beam, whose intensity depended on the picture element, was converted into an electrical signal by the cell. At the receiving end, there was an identical disc turning at the same speed in front of a lamp whose brightness changed according to the received signal.

After a complete rotation of the discs, the entire picture had been scanned. If the discs rotated sufficiently rapidly, in other words if the successive light stimuli followed quickly enough one after the other, the eye no longer perceived them as individual picture elements. Instead, the entire picture was seen as if it were a single unit.

The idea was simple but it could not be put into practice with the materials available at the time. Paul Nipkow made way for other scientiste to make the television.
He died on August, 24th 1940 in Berlin, Germany.