Paul Gottlieb Nipkow

Paul Gottlieb Nipkow (born August 22, 1860, Lauenburg, Pomerania [now Lębork, Poland—died August 24, 1940, Berlin, Germany) was a German engineer who discovered television’s scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analyzed and transmitted. Nipkow’s invention in 1884 of a rotating disk (Nipkow disk) with one or more spirals of apertures that passed successively across the picture made a mechanical television system possible. The Nipkow disk was supplanted in 1934 by electronic scanning devices.