Nipkow, Paul Gottlieb

Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, (born August 22, 1860, Lauenburg, Pomerania [now Lębork, Poland—died August 24, 1940, Berlin, Germany), 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.