Isaac Shoenberg

Sir Isaac Shoenberg (1 March 1880 – 25 January 1963) was a British electronic engineer born in Belarus who was best known for his role in the history of television. He was the head of the EMI research team that developed the 405-line (Marconi-EMI system), the first fully electronic television system to be used in regular broadcasting when it was introduced with the BBC Television Service in 1936. It was later adopted by other TV organizations around the world. Schoenberg was awarded the IET Faraday Medal by the British Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1954 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1962.

Biography Shoenberg was born on 1 March 1880 to Jewish parents in Pinsk, Imperial Russia (now Belarus)

He met his wife, Esther Aisenstein, while they both studied at Kiev.

Career In 1905, Shoenberg was employed to design and install the earliest wireless stations in Russia. However, in 1914, the family emigrated to London so that Isaac could study for a doctoral degree at Imperial College. He was recruited by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1928 as general manager. which formed the heart of the television cameras they designed for the BBC.

In 1934, EMI formed a new company with Marconi with a research team led by Shoenberg alongside Marconi's Simeon Aisenstein which, with access to patents developed by Vladimir Zworykin and RCA, made significant contributions to the development of television including developing the electronic Marconi-EMI system, the world's first electronic high-definition television system. a group of Russian Jewish scientists wanted their research to advance military technology with the possibility of a forthcoming war with Germany and raised funds for the research at EMI-Marconi. The account, credited to British government scientist Brian Callick, is supported by other contemporary evidence. The group, also including Simeon Aisenstein, Vladimir Zworykin and David Sarnoff, knew each other well from Russia and saw possible military applications for their work on television, though Zworykin was brought up as a Christian. The group is said to have raised one million pounds sterling (about $5 million at the time) from US donors. The specific work took place at EMI-Marconi in the U.K. and resulted in Britain becoming significantly advanced in television development and able to launch a public service on 2 November 1936. The military applications helped the development of radio-location (later named radar). In addition the design and production in quantity of television equipment and sets allowed the similar military technology (cathode ray tubes, VHF transmission and reception and wideband circuits to be advanced. A former British defence minister, Lord Orr-Ewing, referred to the work in a 1979 BBC interview and stated “that’s how we won the Battle of Britain”.

In the development work on television Shoenberg's team analysed how the iconoscope (or Emitron) produces an electronic signal and concluded that its efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum. They improved upon this by developing and patenting in 1934 two new camera tubes dubbed super-Emitron and CPS Emitron. The super-Emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original Emitron and iconoscope tubes and, in some cases, this ratio was considerably greater. This was the world's first regular high-definition television service and became the standard for all British TV broadcasts until the 1960s. It was later adopted by other TV organisations around the world.

In 1955, Schoenberg was appointed to the board of EMI.

He died in London in 1963 and was buried in the Liberal Jewish Cemetery, Willesden, in the London Borough of Brent.

In fiction Schoenberg was portrayed by Leon Lissek in the 1986 TV movie The Fools on the Hill by Jack Rosenthal which dramatised the events around the first broadcasts by the BBC from Alexandra Palace in 1936.