born July 30, 1889, Murom, Russia
died July 29, 1982, Princeton, N.J., U.S.
Russian-born U.S. electronic engineer and inventor.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1919. While with Westinghouse Electric Corp. (1920–29), he filed patent applications for his inventions of the iconoscope (a TV transmission tube, 1923) and the kinescope (TV receiver, 1924), which formed the first all-electronic TV system. He patented a colour TV system in 1928. In 1929 he became director of electronic research at RCA. His electron image tube, sensitive to infrared light, was the basis for devices first used in World War II for seeing in the dark.