Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow (22 August 1860 – 24 August 1940) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 technician

Technician

A technician is a worker in a field of technology who is proficient in the relevant skills and techniques, with a relatively practical understanding of the theoretical principles. Experienced technicians in a specific tool domain typically have intermediate understanding of theory and expert...

 and inventor.
Nipkow was a German of born in Lauenburg

Lebork

Lębork is a town on the Łeba and Okalica rivers in Middle Pomerania region, north-western Poland with some 37,000 inhabitants.Lębork is also the capital of Lębork County in Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999, formerly in Słupsk Voivodeship ....

 (Lębork) in Pomerania. While at school in Neustadt

Wejherowo

Wejherowo is a town in Gdańsk Pomerania, northern Poland, with 47,435 inhabitants . It has been the capital of Wejherowo County in Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999; previously, it was a town in Gdańsk Voivodeship .-History:...

 (Wejherowo), West Prussia

West Prussia

West Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773–1824 and 1878–1919/20 which was created out of the earlier Polish province of Royal Prussia...

, Nipkow experimented in telephony and the transmission of moving pictures. After graduation, he went to Berlin in order to study science. He studied physiological optics with Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...

, and electro-physics with Adolf Slaby

Adolf Slaby

Adolf Karl Heinrich Slaby was a German wireless pioneer and the first Professor of electro-technology at the Technical University of Berlin .-Education:Slaby was born in Berlin, the son of a bookbinder...

.
While still a student he conceived the idea of using a spiral-perforated disk (Nipkow disk

Nipkow disk

A Nipkow disk , also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, geometrically operating image scanning device, invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow...

), to divide a picture into a mosaic of points and lines.