Boris Grabovsky

Who was Boris Grabovsky?

Boris Pavlovich Grabovsky was a Soviet engineer who invented the a fully electronic TV transmitting tube and demonstrated it in 1928.

Boris Grabovsky was born on May 26, 1901 in Tobolsk, Siberia, where his father, a prominent Ukrainian poet Pavlo Hrabovsky was living in exile as a member of the Russian revolutionary movement Narodnaya Volya. After the death of his father the next year, the family moved to Odessa then to Kharkov. In 1917, they had to move to Central Asia, to Kyrgyz village Tokmak. He died in January 1966.

Boris Grabovsky started his education in Tashkent special school. Then he entered preparational faculty of Central Asian University in Tashkent where he worked with Prof. G. Popov. In the university he read articles by Boris Rosing in the field of electronic telescopy. Being excited by the idea of the transmission of images over a distance, he invented the cathode commutator, which was the first prototype of his transmitting tube.