Yanczer, Peter F.

The Eidophor Television System Tools

Invented in 1939 and developed from the early 1940s in Zurich by Dr. Fritz Fisher, the Eidophor projector used a thin oil film on a rotating spherical mirror in vacuum scanned by a 15 kV electron gun to produce surface corrugations that diffracted arc or xenon lamp light through a Schlieren-like bar-and-slit optical system. Used extensively from the early 1950s into the 1980s, it incorporated CBS field-sequential and later dot-sequential color wheels and supported large-screen projection; documentation includes SMPTE articles (1950, 1953) and Eidophor training materials supplied by Bernhard Merk, Switzerland.