If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past.
-- Philo T. Farnsworth on the potential of television
The last answer would most likely come from older people who remember RCA, now defunct though the brand name lives on, sorta. RCA was the electronics powerhouse of much of the last century, dominating radio and television, you would believe that the company was responsible for TV because the company often claimed credit for the device that has dominated our lives.
But in reality, a man named Philo Taylor Farnsworth, pictured to the right. Search for him on the Internet and you will turn up site after site with biographical information on this man whom most people have never heard of.
Phil, as he came to call himself was born in 1906 in Utah to an LDS family. Sources are a bit fuzzy, but it seems that while he was young, his family bought a farm in Rigby, Idaho. Their previous home had no electricity, but this new home had a Delco generator and an old barn that contained a stash of science fiction and popular science magazines that sparked his imagination. When the generator broke down, he did what any curious kid would do -- he took it apart, figured out how it worked, and fixed it.
A form of television existed in the early 20th century, but it relied on mechanical reproduction of moving pictures and wasn't very practical, certainly not suitable as a mass medium. Phil's curious, imaginative mind chewed on the problem and came to the conclusion that the only practical solution would be an all electronic device that could break down pictures quickly and send the information through radio waves to a receiver that could reproduce them on a screen.
The story is that while plowing the fields with a disc harrow plow one day (a harrow plow uses multiple discs to break the ground into to nice, even rows, Phil decided that was needed to happen for TV to work was that images would have to be scanned line by line using a device he would call an "image detector," much like the field he was plowing. He was 14 at the time.
Me, I don't think I would ever connect those two things, but I can barely add simple numbers.
The next year, as he entered high school, he found himself bored with the instruction he received and begged to be allowed to take the science courses the seniors were allowed to take. One of the science teachers, Justin Tolman, took him on as a special project. One day, Philo drew an object on the blackboard and told Tolman it was his solution to making all electronic TV work. Sources disagree, but Philo either gave Tolman a copy of the design or Tolman copied the design into a notebook he kept. Either way that copy would become the evidence needed to convince the Patent Office to issue a patent to Phil and declare him to be the inventor of television
Phil planned to attend college, but his father died shortly after he began his studies, and he took over supporting the family. He read voraciously and taught himself most of what he needed to know about electricity and electronics.
He married at age 18 and taught his willing bride the skills to assist him in his pursuit of creating television. Her brother provided the skills necessary to build the equipment Phil envisioned, given that the parts didn't exist yet.
In 1926 Phil met some businessmen who were interested in his ideas and provided the seed money to produce a device. By 1927, he had made his first working device, with some added funds obtained from a bank in California, where he had moved to pursue his dream. He was 21.
The first transmission consisted of a single line, projected onto a glass slide. He wired his investors: "The damned thing works." The investors asked when they might see some money in the "damn thing," so he put together a broadcast demonstration in which he transmitted a picture of a dollar sign.
Phil was filing patents for his inventions and receiving attention for his work. The folks over at RCA, which pretty much had a lock on radio technology, had been looking into developing a commercially viable television. They had hired a Russian scientist/inventor, Vladimir Zworykin, who had filed a patent application in 1923 for a device he had produced that hadn't worked well enough to survived. In 1929 he developed a camera tube he called an "iconoscope," that RCA though could be their ticket to TV dominance.
Zworykin had been working for Westinghouse before RCA hired him, and the brass at RCA convinced him to pay Phil a visit. Zworykin told Phil he was from Westinghouse and said the company was interested in licensing Phil's technology. Phil quite obligingly showed everything he wanted to see, and Zworykin promptly wired RCA all the details.
RCA produced a working prototype and promptly filed a challenge to Phil's patents, claiming they were based on Zworykin's 1923 patent application. Among their novel arguments was the claim that no 21 year old, self educated person could have possibly come up with the idea.
During the patent hearings, Phil's lawyers called on Tolman to testify, and he produced his copy of the drawing showing Phil's original design, which differed significantly from Zworykin's. The Patent Office ruled in Phil's favor, which forced RCA to license his patents for a time.
But World War II intervened, and the government ordered the conversion of all electronic factories to produced equipment needed for the war effort. By the time those factories returned to TV production, Phil's patents had expired; he didn't have the means to compete with a big corporation; and RCA went full bore into producing TV for the American public, with their marketing department emphasizing that RCA had brought them television.
Phil shifted his work to other inventions, obtaining hundreds of patents for devices that form the basis for many modern ones. One estimate states the fully three quarters of the patents that make television work belonged to Phil.
By the end of his life, Phil had become disillusioned with the hopeful vision outlined in the quote at the beginning of this post. But he did have the opportunity to witness the transmission of the first landing on the moon, which was televised using his technology.
His wife asked how he felt watching the telecast. He replied, "This makes it all worthwhile. Before, I wasn't too sure."
If you want to dig into the story and learn all the details I left out, I recommend Who invented what -- and when, by Paul Schatzkin, Farnsworth's biographer, and Philo T. Farnsworh, Forgotten Genius from The History of Television web site.
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