Utahn Had a Vision -- A Vision of Television
BY DAWN HOUSE
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
The Utah native who as a 14-year-old farm boy had looked across the plowed rows of his father's potato field and envisioned electron beams scanning pictures in horizontal lines is no longer the forgotten inventor of television.
Seventy-five years ago Saturday, on Sept. 7, 1927, Philo Farnsworth was able to take what he later called an epiphany and make it a reality, transmitting a single line of light in a makeshift lab in San Francisco.
"There you have it," said the 21-year-old Farnsworth. "Electronic television."
Within two years, the man who was born in a log cabin on a hardscrabble farm near Beaver in 1906 had put together the world's first electronic television system, transmitting two dimensional moving pictures. He filed 10 patents from 1927 to 1929 that formed the basis for his system: a camera tube for pictorial scanning, circuitry and a magnetically focused cathode ray tube for viewing.
But then a lengthy patent infringement fight against the Radio Corporation of America sapped his energy, wrecked his health and nearly forced him into bankruptcy.
Farnsworth won the patent case, but RCA went on to dominate the television market. Encyclopedias credited his arch rival at RCA, Vladimir Zworykin, with inventing television. Reference books that did mention Farnsworth described him as only one of many contributors to the birth of TV.
His slide into obscurity was underscored in 1957, when Farnsworth walked away with $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes after panelists on the television show "I've Got a Secret" failed to identify him.
"Does what you do cause pain?" asked one panelist.
"Sometimes it does, yes," Farnsworth answered.
Now, three recent books and other sources have revived the legacy of Farnsworth as the inventor of the medium that would transform modern life.
Time magazine spearheaded the reappraisal in 1999 by naming him one of the 20th century's greatest scientists -- and the only one who did not complete college. (He dropped out of Brigham Young University when his father died.)
A Man Named Phil: "For those inclined to think of our fading century as an era of the common man, let it be noted that the inventor of one of the century's greatest machines was a man called Phil," wrote Neil Postman for Time. "I refer, of course, to Philo Taylor Farnsworth. The 'of course' is meant as a joke, since almost no one outside the industry has ever heard of him. But we ought not to let the century expire without attempting to make amends."
Postman said he chose Farnsworth as the father of television because Farnsworth was named the winner in the famous 1932 case that pitted Zworykin's patent against Farnsworth's invention, including the camera tube Farnsworth had named the Image Dissector.
"I was impressed at how hard RCA tried to obliterate Farnsworth's contribution or minimize it," said Postman, who is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media Ecology at New York University.
"There was so much money behind what they were doing that I became suspicious. Of all the evidence that impressed me was the one showing Farnsworth had the design when he was only 14 years old."
That evidence was produced by Farnsworth's chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, who testified in the patent case that Farnsworth had confided his boyhood idea to him for an electronic TV system when Farnsworth was attending high school in Rigby, Idaho, where the Farnsworths had moved when the boy was 11.
"I told you I wanted to be an inventor, and this is my invention," Farnsworth told his teacher. "I've got to tell you about it. You're the only person I can make sense to."
Tolman was able to diagram Farnsworth's idea from memory, and under cross-examination repeated in detail what Farnsworth had described. He even produced Farnsworth's student notebooks and the boy's original drawing. Tolman didn't understand what Farnsworth had said, but he was so impressed that he had tucked away the materials since that afternoon in 1922 when the two of them had talked.
Perhaps only one or two men on the planet could have comprehended Farnsworth's idea at that time, said Postman, and one of them would have been the much older, affluent and educated Zworykin.
Meeting of Minds: Zworykin first met Farnsworth in 1930 when he visited Farnsworth's lab, held up the Image Dissector and exclaimed, "This is a splendid instrument. I wish I would have invented it myself," according to George Everson, a financial backer whose 1949 Farnsworth biography was the only one for more than 40 years.
Two books published this year, The Last Lone Inventor by Evan Schwartz, and The Boy Genius and The Mogul, by Daniel Stashower, charge that Zworykin and his boss, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, stole Farnsworth's invention. It is a contention, however, that is disputed by noted television historian Albert Abramson.
"I have great respect for Philo Farnsworth and his contributions to television, but things have gotten out of hand," said Abramson. "Sarnoff never took anything from him. Sarnoff was in the business of either buying or through interferences [patent cases] was out to get all of the essentials for a workable television system. This he did admirably."
Zworykin's Legacy: He credits Sarnoff with bankrolling Zworykin and a team of brilliant RCA engineers with perfecting and making television affordable and practical. In fact, modern TV systems are based on Zworykin's Kinescope, a television picture tube, the Zworykin Iconoscope, a camera tube that has electrical storage capacity, and RCA engineer Randall Ballard's system of interlaced scanning, a system which creates what the eye sees as a complete picture.
"Farnsworth's worthy invention was different,'' said Abramson, the author of several books on the history of television. "It was the slope wave generator," in which images are scanned in straight lines, from left to right and running from top to bottom.
When asked in a KSL-TV television documentary years later about Zworykin's contributions, Farnsworth replied: "I have no doubt that God could inspire two scientists at the same time and in different places with similar ideas."
Still, the Patent Office ruled that Farnsworth indeed had invented the world's first all-electronic television system.
"Sarnoff had three options," said Donald Godfrey, author of Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television. "He could invent around Farnsworth's system, buy him out or tie him up in the courts. Eventually, Sarnoff did all three."
"It still gets under my skin when I think about all their dirty tricks,'' said his widow, Elma "Pem" Farnsworth, who wrote a book in 1990 on her husband's life, Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier.
Sarnoff also initiated a widespread public relations effort to credit RCA and Zworykin with inventing television. The U.S. television industry's highest honor is named after Zworykin's invention, the Image Orthicon, nicknamed the "Immy." The name later evolved into the "Emmy" award.
Farnsworth did not have the money, backing or health to continue in television. He began drinking when doctors suggested that alcohol could relieve his active, racing mind. He spent his final years researching fusion. When Farnsworth died in 1971 in Salt Lake City, he was credited with more than 300 American and foreign patents, including devices that extended the vision of large telescopes and infra-red lights for night vision.
For more than 30 years, his widow has led a crusade to win recognition for the husband she helped in the laboratory during the heady days of his television inventions.
She worked for and lived to see Farnsworth awarded an Emmy posthumously, a bronze plaque erected at his San Francisco lab, his image emblazoned on a 20-cent U.S. postage stamp and a statue of Farnsworth placed in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. The Farnsworth statue holds an Image Dissector in its hands.
'Things Will Work Out': "Phil used to say that we're on a guided tour, we need to go on, do the best we can and things will work out all right," said Pem Farnsworth, 94, who lives with their son in Fort Wayne, Ind. "I am aware of being helped many times in my life, so I didn't get discouraged."
Unlike Zworykin, the Farnsworths did not have a corporation to publicize his achievements, but they had a church. Farnsworth, a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stopped attending services when he was 17, after his father died, and did not return until his move back to Utah in 1967.
Still, Mormon officials have long evoked his name as the inventor of television working under the influence of the Lord, said Godfrey.
"I am a deeply religious man, I know that God exists," said Farnsworth in a KSL interview a year before his death. "I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as culture could earn them. I give the credit to God."