Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton FRS (18 October 1863 – 19 February 1930) was a Scottish consulting electrical engineer, who provided the theoretical basis for the electronic television, two decades before the technology existed to implement it.

Campbell-Swinton's concept was central to the cathode ray television because of his proposed modification of the CRT that allowed its use as both a transmitter and receiver of light.

[1] The CRT was the system of electronic television that was subsequently developed in later years, as technology caught up with Campbell-Swinton's initial ideas.

[6] Campbell-Swinton wrote a letter in response to an article in the 4 June 1908 issue of Nature by Shelford Bidwell entitled "Telegraphic Photography and Electric Vision".

He wrote: "This part of the problem of obtaining distant electric vision can probably be solved by the employment of two beams of cathode rays (one at the transmitting and one at the receiving station) synchronously deflected by the varying fields of two electromagnets placed at right angles to one another and energised by two alternating electric currents of widely different frequencies, so that the moving extremities of the two beams are caused to sweep simultaneously over the whole of the required surface within the one-tenth of a second necessary to take advantage of visual persistence.

They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam.

Alongside his research into the electrical transmission of images, Campbell-Swinton also worked in voice telephony, founding the short-lived Equitable Telephone Association in the 1880s.