Dr. Rudolf Hell and the birthing of TV

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russssellcrow
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Dr. Rudolf Hell and the birthing of TV

Post by russssellcrow »

Much is made of Philo Farnsworth and the invention of Television, but history smooths over the bumpy parts. The facts are that while Farnsworth's TV was patented and basically functional in 1927 (some 20 years before it came to fruition in the USA), the details were worked out in Germany by Dr. Rudolf Hell.
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Dr. Rudolf Hell was a grad student when he patented the "shadowmask screen" in 1927. Early Television screens were blurry, because the electron beam struck the phosphor layer behind the glass envelope, and spread in a Gaussian pattern. Rudolf Hell devised a metal screen, which was placed in front of the phosphor screen, which forced the electrons to create amplitude peaks (see Double Slit Diffraction), thus sharpening details and making the Television look to the human eye like a picture of the real world. In 1936, Germany broadcast the Olympic Games to the World, a monumental achievement, which is downplayed in History because of the horrific acts of Gemany's Nazis. Dr. Hell also invented the Fax Machine, which is minor to the television in scope.

In 1925, Rudolf Hell, filed a patent along with Dieckmann for a photoelectric scanning tube that was basically a primitive television camera. The concept behind this device—the “image dissector tube”—was that images or scenes could be broken up into small picture elements and transmitted to a receiver for viewing. In that same year, Hell and Dieckmann presented a complete radio-based television system at the Transport Exposition in Munich that included a reception station.

Television wasn't mass-marketed until over 20 years later, in 1946, when global war had subsided. The patent which made TV workable is forgotten, and Farnsworth is a name which few people recognize when they click on their favorite TV stories; but these men were giants.

I know about Dr. Hell because I have worked for his company. I began with Hell Graphic Systems in Los Angeles in 1983. We built image scanners which used Dr. Hell's Maths to encode picture data and Laser engrave it to film and metal. Our systems augmented Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" policy during the Cold War, to confirm Soviet weapons stockpiles from satellite reconnaissance. When I would attend classes at Hell Graphics in the 1980s, some fellow student would ask, "why on Earth did they do it this way?", the answer was a Cold War joke, "To confuse the Russians". They weren't joking.
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