Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton

Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton
Alan Campbell-Swinton
Born	(1863-10-18)18 October 1863 Albyn Place, Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	19 February 1930(1930-02-19) (aged 66)
Residence	Scotland
Nationality	British
Education	Fettes College, Edinburgh
Occupation	Electrical engineer
Known for	The first man to provide the theoretical basis for a completely electronic television system
Notes
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915

Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton FRS (18 October 1863 – 19 February 1930) was a Scottish consulting electrical engineer, who provided the theoretical basis for the electronic television, two decades before the technology existed to implement it. He began experimenting around 1903 with the use of cathode ray tubes for the electronic transmission and reception of images. Campbell described the theoretical basis for an all electronic method of producing television in a 1908 letter to Nature. Campbell-Swinton’s concept was central to the cathode ray television because of his proposed modification of the cathode ray tube that allowed its use as both a transmitter and receiver of light. The cathode-ray tube was the system of electronic television that was subsequently developed in later years, as technology caught up with Campbell-Swinton's initial ideas. Other inventors would use Campbell-Swinton's ideas, as a starting-point to realise the cathode ray tube television as the standard, workable form of all electronic television that it became for decades after his death. It is generally considered that the original credit for the successful theoretical conception of using a cathode ray tube device for imaging should belong to Campbell-Swinton.

Campbell-Swinton was educated at Cargilfield Trinity School and Fettes College (1878–1881).

He was one of the first to explore the medical applications of radiography, opening the first radiographic laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1896. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915. He is better known by his work on the electronic television. He discovered the phenomenon known as magnetic focusing in 1896, he found that a longitudinal magnetic field generated by an axial coil can focus an electron beam.

Campbell-Swinton wrote a letter in response to an article in the 4 June 1908 issue of Nature by Shelford Bidwell entitled "Telegraphic Photography and Electric Vision". Even as early as 1908, it was recognised that "The final, insurmountable problems with any form of mechanical scanning were the limited number of scans per second, which produced a flickering image, and the relatively large size of each hole in the disk, which resulted in poor resolution".