Kenjiro Takayanagi

Career

In 1925, Takayanagi began research on television after reading about the new technology in a French magazine. He developed a system similar to that of John Logie Baird, using a Nipkow disk to scan the subject and generate electrical signals. Unlike Baird's display method, Takayanagi used a cathode ray tube to display the received signal, thereby demonstrating electronic image reception. On December 25, 1926, Takayanagi successfully demonstrated his system at Hamamatsu Industrial High School, where he was teaching at the time (the school is now the Faculty of Engineering at Shizuoka University). The first picture he transmitted was of the Japanese katakana character イ made up of 40 scan lines. This was several months before Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrated his first fully electronic system in San Francisco on September 7, 1927, which did not require a Nipkow disk. (See History of television.)

In subsequent years, Takayanagi continued to play a key role in the development of television at NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation), where he worked on higher-line electronic television systems, including a 40-line image of a human face by 1933, and then at JVC (Victor Company of Japan), where he eventually became vice president. In the late 1950s, he developed a two-head, helical scan video tape recorder. He was also involved in the development of color television. In 1984, he created his own foundation for the study of electronics. In 1988, he became the first Japanese person to become an honorary member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers He died of pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 91.