The inventor of holography fought a years-long patent war over flat TV screens
In 1958 Dennis Gabor, later famous for holography, patented a flat cathode-ray tube so similar to William Aiken's design that the two spent years in court. By the time the rulings came, the products had died and the rivals had become friends. Flat screens only took over some fifty years later.
General Electric sketched the first engineering proposal for a flat-panel television in 1954, growing out of its radar work, but never built one. The Aiken tube, developed in the early 1950s and made in small numbers from 1958, found military use as a head-up display, and the Philco Predicta, sold that same year with a comparatively shallow tube, was a commercial flop. The young Clive Sinclair spent a decade trying and failing to commercialize Gabor's design. Plasma panels, invented at the University of Illinois in 1964, glow when voltage across crossed electrodes lights up tiny pockets of gas such as neon.
Liquid-crystal displays won in the end. Their key ingredient was the thin-film transistor, developed at RCA in 1962 from the MOSFET invented at Bell Labs a few years earlier. RCA's Bernard Lechner conceived a transistor-driven LCD in 1968, Westinghouse researchers demonstrated the first thin-film-transistor LCD in 1973, and Japanese companies built pocket LCD televisions by 1982. When a Sharp team showed a 14-inch full-colour LCD in 1988, the industry became convinced LCDs would replace picture tubes.
Light-emitting diodes followed their own path. Hewlett-Packard introduced the first practical LED display in 1968 and a numeric indicator in 1969 that replaced glowing Nixie tubes. Ching Tang and Steven Van Slyke at Kodak built the first practical organic LED in 1987, and Sony released the first OLED television, the XEL-1, in 2007.
Flat panels are usually under 10 centimetres thick and use less power, which suited laptops and phones. By 2016 they had almost entirely displaced cathode-ray tubes. Most need constant refreshing and go blank without power, while e-ink screens use materials with two stable states and keep their image when switched off.
Source: Flat-panel display
