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Time Machine - RCA TK-11
“That Was Then!”
RCA TK-11: The Industry's First Workhorse
Before CCD sensors, there were tubes. American inventor Philo Farnsworth, age 14, drew his idea for an all-electronic TV pickup tube on the blackboard at school in 1922. A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field.
By 1927, Farnsworth was sending a single horizontal line of light to a TV display. His dissector tube, however, needed an enormous amount of light and suffered from a lack of sensitivity. In 1930, after a visit to Farnsworth's laboratory, Vladimir Zworykin copied this apparatus for RCA, though he found it impractical and returned to his work on what would become the Image Orthicon tube.
Farnsworth and RCA's David Sarnoff battled in court throughout the inventor's lifetime for credit to the invention of electronic television. Though Farnsworth got the credit, the modern image orthicon tube-a 1000 times more sensitive than the dissector tube-was probably jointly developed by Farnsworth and Zworykin. A variation of the tube was used in television cameras until CCDs appeared in the mid-1980s.
Though other models of cameras used image orthicon tubes in the late 1940s, it was RCA's legendary TK-11 that made history as the first workhorse of the broadcast industry. Introduced in 1952, the camera remained in use until the late 1960s-even after the arrival of color television.
For studio use, RCA called the camera the TK-11. For remote use, using mobile control units, the camera became the TK-31. Because the associated equipment was so heavy, the camera was normally relegated to remote trucks.
Because the TK-11 used turret lenses, rather than a single zoom lens, camera operators had to learn to rack to the correct lens while dollying the camera into position. The coordination required was an exceptional skill-one honed by live television-especially with a nervous director barking orders simultaneously into a headset.
Before CCD sensors, there were tubes. American inventor Philo Farnsworth, age 14, drew his idea for an all-electronic TV pickup tube on the blackboard at school in 1922. A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field. 