Archibald Campbell-Swinton Describes "Distant Electric Vision," the Earliest Concept for Electronic or CRT Television

In a four paragraph letter written to the journal Nature dated June 18, 1908 English electrical engineer A.A. Campbell-Swinton described his concept of electronic television using the cathode ray tube which had been invented in 1897 by the German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Ferdinand Braun.

Swinton "proposed using an electron beam in both the camera and the receiver, which could be steered electronically to produce moving pictures. He lectured on the subject in 1911 and displayed circuit diagrams, but no one, including Swinton, knew how to realize the design. Although his system was never built, the cathode ray tube did come to be used to display images in almost all television sets and computer monitors until the invention of the LCD panel."