Born in Üzbég, Kingdom of Hungary, Tihanyi studied electrical engineering and physics in Pozsony and Budapest. The problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved with the introduction of charge-storage technology by Tihanyi in the beginning of 1924. His final design was patented under the name "Radioskop" in 1926. His patent application contained 42 pages detailing its design and mass production. It is recorded in UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. Though it bears certain similarities to earlier proposals employing a cathode ray tube for both transmitter and receiver, Tihanyi's system represented a radical departure. Like the final, improved version Tihanyi would patent in 1928, it embodied an entirely new concept in design and operation, building upon a technology that would become known as the "storage principle". This technology involves the maintenance of photoemission from the light-sensitive layer of the detector tube between scans. By this means, accumulation of charges would take place and the "latent electric picture" would be stored. Tihanyi filed two separate patent applications in 1928 then extended patent protection beyond Germany, filing in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. In 1928, Tihanyi went to Berlin, where the development of mechanical television involving Nipkow disks had already been begun by the German Post Office and the larger manufacturers. The invention was received with enthusiasm by Telefunken and Siemens, but in the end they opted to continue with the development of mechanical television. From 1929, Tihanyi worked on television guidance for defense applications, building prototypes of a camera for remotely guided aircraft in London for the British Air Ministry, and later adapting it for the Italian Navy. The solutions of the technology what Tihanyi depicted in his 1929 patent were so influential, that American UAV producing companies still used many of its ideas even half century later, until the mid 1980s. In 1929, he invented the first infrared-sensitive electronic television camera for anti-aircraft defense in Britain. Tihanyi's U.S. patents for his display and camera tubes, assigned to RCA, were issued in 1938 and 1939, respectively. In 1936 Tihanyi described the principle of "plasma television" and conceived the first flat-panel television system. It involved a single “transmission point” being moved at great speed behind a grid of cells arranged in a thin panel display, which would be excited to different levels by varying the voltages to the point He died in Budapest, aged 49.
In a Technikatörténeti Szemle article, subsequently reissued on the internet, entitled The Iconoscope: Kalman Tihanyi and the Development of Modern Television, Tihanyi's daughter Katalin Tihanyi Glass notes that her father found the "storage principle" included a "new physical phenomenon", the photoconductive effect:
