It is difficult to answer the question about who invented the TV set at first sight, because the history of the TV set as technology had two branches of development based on different principles - electromechanical TV set (mechanical) and electronic. Often, economic, political, and ideological interests are always squeezed in response to such questions, which makes things even more confusing.
As a rule, you can find the following names to which the TV invention is attributed: Baird, Rosing, Zvorykin, Kataev, Persky, Nipkov, Takayanagi, Farnsworth. Let's try to understand these names and how each of them contributed to the invention of the TV.
Nipkov Paul Julius Gottlieb
(1860 — 1940)Technician and inventor from Germany. It is known first of all that in 1884 he invented the disc, which was called "Nipkov's disc". The disk allowed to scan objects mechanically so that information about them could be transmitted to the receiver in the future. The disk was a usual rotating circle with holes in the spiral. Rotating, it allowed to read the object line by line. Nipkov did not invent a TV set but invented an important component for mechanical television.
John Logie Baird
(1888 — 1946)By the 1920s, when signal amplification made television more practical, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had used Nipkov's disc in his prototype video systems. On March 25, 1925, Baird gave the first public demonstration of television silhouette images on the move at the Selfridge department store in London. Since human faces did not have enough contrast to show themselves in his primitive system, he was broadcasting the head of a talking ventriloquist dummy called "Stooky Bill", whose painted face was more contrasting. By January 26, 1926, he had for the first time presented the transmission of a human face in motion, via radio, which is considered the first television transmission in the world. In 1927, he launched the world's first broadcast, transmitting a signal between London and Glasgow at a distance of 705 km.
Rosing Boris Lvovich
(1869 — 1933)Rosing was a Russian scientist-physicist, teacher and inventor. He understood the deadlock in the development of mechanical television, so he began his research by introducing an inertia-free electron beam into the television system, thus opening an alternative way for the development of television communication. His main merit was not even that he proposed a new way of transmitting images at a distance, which was still very imperfect, but that this way of transmission set the vector of development for all television systems of the future, including the modern ones.
Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton
(1863 — 1930)Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton was a Scottish electrical engineer who was Rosing's main competitor in the development of the theoretical framework for electric television. Campbell-Swinton, like Rosing, understood that mechanical television was limited in its development because of the limited number of scanning lines, resulting in poor image quality and flickering images. In 1908, he wrote an article for Nature magazine where he gave his view of the "electric vision".
Takayanagi Kenjiro
(1899 — 1990)On December 25, 1925, the Japanese Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a resolution of 40 lines, which used a Nipkov's disk scanner and an electron-beam tube. This prototype is still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum at Shizuoka University, at the Hamamatsu campus in Japan.
Farnsworth Philo Taylor
(1906 — 1971)Farnsworth is an American inventor of television. His contribution is that he invented a special transmission device called "Image Dissector", which did the same thing as Nipkov's disk in the mechanical system, it allowed the image to be broken down into electrical signals.
Kataev Semyon Isidorovich
(1904 — 1991)Kataev was a Soviet inventor and scientist who was engaged in the development of Rosing's ideas in practice. Kataev began to develop CRTs with magnetic focus. The result of his work was the so-called "radio eye" - an analog of the iconoscope Zvorykin. Kataev S.I. tested his invention in 1931, and in 1933 received a patent for it in the USSR. Later, when Zvorykin and Kataev showed each other their inventions, Zvorykin noted that the radio eye on some parameters exceeds his iconoscope.
Zvorykin Vladimir Kozmich
(1888 - 1982)Zvorykin was also a Russian inventor and disciple of Boris Rosing.Zvorykin is considered to be the inventor of the TV set in the West, but this, of course, cannot be considered for the many reasons that we have already noted above, although his contribution to the development of television is also difficult to overestimate.In 1935 V.K. Zvorykin received a patent in the USA for his invention, although he arranged demonstrations of his invention in 1926. TVs with magnetic focus until the 70's of the 20th century were more common because for a long time it was not possible to get not inferior in quality to CRT with electrostatic focus. But it was with the appearance of the iconoscope that electronic television became a reality in full measure.
THROUGH
As already written above, one should distinguish between electromechanical and electronic TV sets.
Mechanical television appeared in parallel to electronic television, so it cannot be considered a precursor, rather a dead-end branch of development.Therefore, all the names associated with a mechanical TV can be excluded from the applicants for the invention of a TV as we know it.
Thus, Nipkov, Baird, and others did not invent an electronic television set.
On the Internet one can often find the thesis that Kataev applied for a patent earlier than Zvorykin and that it is formally more correct to count him as the inventors of the television, but in fact, Zvorykin invented his iconoscope earlier, but because of bureaucratic red tape his patent was long considered.
It doesn't matter, because they were both students of Rosing, Zvorykin once did not confirm the priority of Rosing in the invention of television, so it is Rosing Boris Lvovich, obviously, and should be named the inventor of the TV. He is headed by other people who are real, were active people