This feature looks at the first time famous names or terms appeared in The Times. Have an idea for someone or something you would like to read about? Send a suggestion in the comments section.

Arthur Korn may not be a household name like Albert Einstein, another German-born mathematician and physicist with whom he corresponded, but the inventions that he had a hand in — the fax machine and the television — certainly are. Dr. Korn was a pioneer in the field of sending images via telegraph, transmitting photographs of German and British royalty in 1906 and 1907. These photoelectric facsimiles wrought profound changes in fields ranging from newspapers to law enforcement, and helped pave the way for John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor who in 1925 transmitted the first television image.



Dr. Korn saw it all coming and in an article on Feb. 24, 1907, in The New York Times, he suggested that television might be just a year or two away:

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A second article about his work, on Nov. 24, 1907, carried the headline: “Photographs by Telegraph: Television Next?”

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Left jobless by the Nazis’ campaign against Jewish academics, Dr. Korn fled Germany in 1939, finding refuge in New Jersey, like Einstein. He taught at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken — and performed research for a subsidiary of The New York Times before he died in 1945: