Paul Nipkow
Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow (born August 22, 1860 in Lauenburg i. Pom. (Today: Lębork in Poland ), † August 24, 1940 in Berlin ) was a German technician and inventor.
Beginnings
Paul Nipkow was born in 1860 as the son of the master baker and city councilor Friedrich Wilhelm Nipkow. He first attended the Progymnasium in Lauenburg i. Pom. , from 1880 the Royal High School in Neustadt in West Prussia . At that time he was already busy with practical experiments in telephony and was already thinking of the additional transmission of moving images. After graduating from high school in Easter 1882, he went to Berlin to study mathematics and natural sciences at the Friedrich Wilhelms University and to become a teacher at a secondary school. But he also attended lectures at the Technical University of Charlottenburg : Physiological optics with Hermann von Helmholtz and electrophysical problems with Adolf Slaby .
Nipkow disk
_Paul_Nipkow.jpg)
_Paul_Nipkow.jpg)
As a student, Nipkow invented “his” disk for image decomposition. According to his own accounts, this happened on Christmas Eve 1883 when he was sitting alone in his furnished room at Phillipstrasse 13a in Berlin-Mitte in front of his kerosene lamp and the idea had occurred to him to create a picture “like a mosaic in dots and Lines ”. The innovation consisted of the spiral-shaped disk, the splitting of images into points for telegraphic transmission had already been realized by Alexander Bain before Nipkov's birth.
For this disc, he applied to the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin for an imperial patent for an electric telescope for "electrical reproduction of luminous objects" in the category of electrical devices . It was granted to him on January 15, 1885 retrospectively to January 6, 1884. It is not known whether Nipkow ever tried to make this disc practical. One can assume, however, that he never built a corresponding device himself. Since there was no other interest in the patent, it expired after fifteen years.
Employment
In the summer of 1885 Paul Nipkow broke off his studies for financial reasons. On December 12, 1885, he married his college friend Sophia Colonius, who showed a great deal of understanding for his inventive activities. So she , at that time still his fiancée, registered his “electric telescope” with the Reich Patent Office on January 6, 1884 at her own expense. His actual field of activity, however, lay in his professional career. After dropping out of his studies, he registered as a “ one-year volunteer ” with the railway regiment in Berlin-Schöneberg . After completing this service, the company Zimmermann & Buchloh - Eisenbahnsignalbauanstalt in Borsigwalde near Berlin hired him as a construction engineer on October 1st, 1886.
First television systems
After the First World War , efforts began among radio-frequency technicians for the electrical transmission of images, with the first television transmissions all working with optical-mechanical image scanning, most of them with a Nipkow disk. This prompted Paul Nipkow to work again in this field, and another patent was issued, this time for a device for achieving synchronism in apparatus for electrical image generation, characterized in that all cooperating transmitters and receivers are connected to one and the same AC power distribution network are connected. In 1932/33, Manfred von Ardennes' electronic image scanning established itself with its superior quality, whereupon Nipkow's invention was only relevant for television in England for some time. The decisive advances in the development of television from the 1930s onwards were primarily attributable to Manfred von Ardenne.
Broadcaster Paul Nipkow
The world's first public television station, which went into operation in 1935, was named "Paul Nipkow television station" after the "father" of the first generation of television technology, which was based on the Nipkow disc as a mechanical variant. Nipkow became honorary president of the television working group of the Reich Broadcasting Chamber . The Reichssendeleiter spoke of the "German television pioneer" who came up with the "general idea" of television.
Honors
On his 75th birthday, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main awarded Paul Nipkow an honorary doctorate in natural sciences.
His hometown of Lauenburg made him an honorary citizen in 1937 and named a street after him (Paul-Nipkow-Straße, today ulica Targowa). Other cities named streets after him, e.g. B. Bonn.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1940, Reichsintendant Heinrich Glasmeier set up a Paul Nipkow Foundation , which was intended to enable the staff of the Paul Nipkow television station to spend vacations in the recreational facilities of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation .
Two days after his 80th birthday, Nipkow died of a heart attack in Berlin . He received a state funeral, the state ceremony taking place on August 30, 1940 in the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin . His grave is in the Pankow III municipal cemetery in Dept. C-13. It is dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave .
Quotes
“Finally on Christmas Eve 1883, when I was sitting on Philippstrasse in Berlin without a tree or candles, everything was put on paper [,] and somehow I managed to get the twenty marks for the patent application, and on January 6th ] In 1884 everything was in the patent office. "
“I still have a joy in my old days. I have not been completely forgotten, even though the Nipkow disk is the only benefit I have from my invention that bears my name in the whole world. But this name has probably become a term that people no longer ask about the origin […] Yes, I am actually the inventor of television [,] and I can safely say this without being conceited. I have the confirmation of the experts, I do not have the fortune and the fortune. And it is a crazy opinion to address television as a “young” invention. She is forty-seven years old! On Christmas Eve of 1883 I thought through to the end of the construction that is still used in its basic forms in television today. The improvements are only due to the general progress of technology. On January 6, 1884, I registered my invention as German Imperial Patent No. 30.105. […] The telephone was as young then as the radio is today [,] and I thought to myself that it should actually be useful if the people who were telephoning together could also see each other. But I also thought to myself that you can't transfer the picture all at once, but that you have to break it down into pixels. I wanted to carry out the transmission electronically, converting the current impulses arriving from the transmitting station back into pixels at the receiving station. But I needed a certain apparatus to decompose and assemble images. The idea came to me in a flash: to construct a disc with holes arranged in a spiral. This disc is still used all over the world today [,] and it is also what bears my name: the Nipkow disc. "
literature
- Walter Bruch : Brief history of German television (= book series of the SFB , Volume 6), Haude and Spener, Berlin 1967, DNB 456205535 .
- Michaela Krützen: The Point / The Matrix. Paul Nipkow's disc, Vilém Flusser's universe and the Borg's cube. In: Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, Joseph Vogl (Eds.): Light and Direction (= Archive for Media History , 2002). Universitätsverlag, Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-86068-175-3 , pp. 113-123.
- Helmut Lindner: Nipkow, Julius Paul Gottfried. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 279 ( digitized version ).
- Claus-Dietrich Schmidt: Paul Nipkow: wynalazca telewizji (1860–1940): życie w służbie postępu (Paul Nipkow: inventor of television). Muzeum, Leborg (Lauenburg in Pommern) 2009, ISBN 978-83-915885-9-8 ( Polish ).
- K. Jäger, F. Heilbronner (ed.): Lexikon der Elektrotechniker , VDE Verlag, 2nd edition from 2010, Berlin / Offenbach, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 , pp. 308-309
Web links
- Newspaper article about Paul Nipkow in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walter Bruch: Brief history of German television , p. 14.
- ↑ Honoring the "father of television". In: Innsbrucker Nachrichten , September 13, 1935, p. 8 (online at ANNO ).
- ^ Nipkowstrasse in Bonn-Hardtberg. Retrieved July 17, 2020.
- ↑ In a nutshell. In: Innsbrucker Nachrichten , 23 August 1940, p. 4 (online at ANNO ).
- ↑ (short message without title). In: Kleine Volks-Zeitung , August 26, 1940, p. 2 (online at ANNO ).
- ^ State funeral for Paul Nipkow. In: Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Democratic organ / Neues Wiener Abendblatt. Evening edition of the (") Neue Wiener Tagblatt (") / Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Evening edition of the Neue Wiener Tagblatt / Wiener Mittagsausgabe with Sportblatt / 6 o'clock evening paper / Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Neue Freie Presse - Neues Wiener Journal / Neues Wiener Tagblatt , August 30, 1940, p. 6 (online at ANNO ).
- ↑ Television - a German invention. In: Innsbrucker Nachrichten , 23 August 1940, p. 11 (online at ANNO ).
- ↑ With the father of television. In: Neues Wiener Journal , 23 August 1930, p. 7 (online at ANNO ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nipkow, Paul |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nipkow, Paul Julius Gottlieb (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German technician and inventor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 22, 1860 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lauenburg in Pomerania |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 24, 1940 |
| Place of death | Berlin |