Paul Nipkow. Portrait of Paul Nipkow (1860-1940), German inventor of the Nipkow disk, a scanner used in early television to cut up images into lines. Patented in 1884, it was a mechanical scanner consisting of a rotating disc with a spiral pattern of holes. This 'electric telescope' rotated in front of the object to be analysed and detailed all its points line by line. This method of cutting images into lines was widely used in early television, but it was displaced in 1932 by electronic scanning.