Vladimir Kosma Zworykin was born in Russia on July 30, 1889. He earned an engineering degree in 1912 from the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, and completed postgraduate work in at the College de Paris in France. When World War I broke out in 1914, Zworykin returned to Russia where he served as a radio engineer in the Army Signal Corps. In 1919, he fled revolutionary Russia and immigrated to the United States, where he secured a position as a research engineer with Westinghouse. While there, he earned a PhD in physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1926. In 1929, Westinghouse transferred Zworykin’s laboratory to the Radio Corporation of America.

Zworykin became the director of RCA’s electronics research laboratory, first located in Camden, New Jersey, and after 1942 at the new RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. It was during his tenure at RCA that he invented the iconoscope and the cathode ray tube that made television possible. In 1954, Zworykin officially retired and was conferred the title of Honorary Vice President of RCA. He nonetheless continued to direct the small General Research Laboratory at the Labs for the next ten years.

Following his retirement, Zworykin became actively engaged in a new passion: medical electronics. Over the next twenty-five years, he served as director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was a founding member of the International Federation for Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering, and actively petitioned to create a national medical electronics organization in the United States.

Zworykin authored or co-authored five books and more than 100 technical papers, earned over 120 patents, received dozens of major awards in his field, and was honored by President Lyndon B. Johnson with the national Medal of Science in 1966. Zworykin died in Princeton New Jersey on July 29, 1982, one day before his ninety-third birthday.