Video camera tube in the context of "Emmy Award"

Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971), "The father of television", was the American inventor and pioneer who was granted the first patent for the television by the United States Government.

He also invented a video camera tube and the image dissector. He commercially produced and sold a fully functioning television system—complete with receiver and camera—which he produced commercially through the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation from 1938 to 1951, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

An electron gun (also called electron emitter) is an electrical component in some vacuum tubes that produces a narrow, collimated electron beam that has a precise kinetic energy.

The largest use is in cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), used in older television sets, computer displays and oscilloscopes, before the advent of flat-panel displays. Electron guns are also used in field-emission displays (FEDs), which are essentially flat-panel displays made out of rows of extremely small cathode-ray tubes. They are also used in microwave linear beam vacuum tubes such as klystrons, inductive output tubes, travelling-wave tubes, and gyrotrons, as well as in scientific instruments such as electron microscopes and particle accelerators.

An image dissector, also called a dissector tube, is a video camera tube in which photocathode emissions create an "electron image" which is then swept up, down and across an anode to produce an electrical signal representing the visual image. It employs magnetic fields to keep the electron image in focus, and later models used electron multiplier to pick up the electrons. The term had also been used for other kinds of early video camera tubes. Dissectors were used only briefly for research in television systems before being replaced by different much more sensitive tubes based on the charge-storage phenomenon like the iconoscope during the 1930s. Despite the camera tubes based on the idea of image dissector technology falling quickly and completely out of use in the field of Television broadcasting, they continued to be used for imaging in early weather satellites and the Lunar lander, and for star attitude tracking in the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.