Who invented the videotape?

Alexander M. Poniatoff, Russian inventor who started off making curling tongs and branding them as machines made by Ampex (His initials plus "ex" for excellence invented a way of recording moving pictures and audio (the audio sadly later faded away) in 1949, but by the time he found a young Bing Crosby to make his machine more popular, his Ampex machine was unheard of since everyone was thinking VERA was the first. Then when the recordings made by VERA were seen and people didn't think they were very good and by the time VERA had been improved to very high standards the VERA machine had long since been uninstalled and due to the bad quality of the televised recordings nobody believed their claims and the BBC and ITV had recently signed contracts with and installed Ampex.

So, bottom line. VERA may have been the first machine to record television images but the first mass-produced (only one or two VERA's were made) videotape recorder apparatus was Ampex.