Celebrate the Emmy Awards with the National Inventors Hall of Fame

The annual Emmy^® awards recognize high-quality television programming, on-screen acting and production work. While the stars of the latest critically acclaimed shows receive much of the publicity each year, Emmy awards are also given to individuals and organizations whose technical contributions have enabled the creation and distribution of our favorite programs.

Many National Inventors Hall of Fame^® (NIHF) Inductees have won Emmy awards, and some even have special award categories named after them! To learn more about these remarkable innovators, we invite you to read below:

NIHF Inductee Emmy Award Winners

1988: Ray Dolby, for his innovations related to audio noise reduction systems and television tape recorders.

2002: Garrett Brown, for the development of remote-controlled, cable-suspended technology.

2005: Charles Ginsburg and Ray Dolby both received a Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the first practical videotape recorder.

2011: Shuji Nakamura, for pioneering the development of large-venue, large-screen, direct view color video displays.

2013: Garrett Brown, for his advances to wearable camera stabilizer technology.

2021: Eric R. Fossum, for the invention and pioneering development of intra-pixel charge transfer CMOS image sensors.

Engineering Emmy Award Categories Named After NIHF Inductees

The Philo T. Farnsworth Award

The Philo T. Farnsworth Award recognizes an institution, company or agency whose long-term impacts have shaped television engineering and technology. 

This award is named for NIHF Inductee Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose television patents covered scanning, focusing, synchronizing, contrast and controls. He is also known for his 1927 invention of the “first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), the ‘image dissector.’”

Recent winners of this award include the American Society of Cinematographers, Avid and Sony.

The Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award

The Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award is given to an organization or company for engineering developments that improve existing methods or are “so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording transmission or reception of television.”

The award is named after NIHF Inductee Charles Jenkins, one of the first inventors of the television.

Former recipients of this award include NIHF Inductees Garrett Brown, Les Paul and Ray Dolby.

Learn More About Our World-Changing Inductees

To discover the stories behind more of our revolutionary Inductees, we invite you to visit our website.