Paul Gottlieb Nipkow

Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow ( German: [ˈpaʊl ˈgɔtliːp ˈnɪpkɔv]; 22 August 1860 – 24 August 1940) was a German electrical engineer and inventor. He invented the Nipkow disk, which laid the foundation of television, since his disk was a fundamental component in the first televisions. Hundreds of stations experimented with television broadcasting using his disk in the 1920s and 1930s, until it was superseded by all-electronic systems in the 1940s.

Nipkow has been called the "father of television", together with other early figures of television history like Karl Ferdinand Braun.