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Originally Posted by rld-tv01
How about Paul Nipkow or before him the guy who heard about the Selenium changing colors from sunlight in the rail way telegraph office and thought he could transmit pictures using it.
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Both contributed to the overall march of technology, but neither of them could put forward a complete end-to-end system in the same manner that Zworykin/Farnsworth did. Baird did a good job of trying, but he made more money selling socks than moving images.
We're basically dissecting the semantics of "Who do we credit for inventing the wheel because we need to put them on the list of Fathers of the Automobile?"
I'll dangle an additional tidbit here along the same vein:
James Watt didn't invent the steam engine. Newcomen invented version 1.0 of what we would identify as a steam engine today. It worked, poorly. Mr Watt saw potential, and made it work the way it was probably intended to operate. This is one of the things that engineers just do. Make it better, make it cheaper, make it stronger. Hope that society as a whole will give you credit if you deserve it. Do it because it needs to be done sooner rather than later. Doing it to save all the drowning Welshmen in the tin mines is also solid motivation.