PHILO T. FARNSWORTH: "Dr. X's" Instant Images
One fine day in a field of hay, an Idaho farm boy dreams up electronic television
In 1957, a "Dr. X" appeared on CBS-TV's I've Got a Secret with this "secret" (as revealed to the studio audience on a flashcard): "I invented electronic television." A second card added--"In 1922 when I was 14 years old." One panelist thought "Dr. X" might be a medical doctor who had invented some kind of machine that was painful when used. "Yes, sometimes it's most painful," he replied, drawing chuckles from the audience. The panel did not guess the secret of the nondescript, frail 50-year-old and gave no sign of recognition when his name was announced. Philo T. Farnsworth's moment on the small screen was brief: "Unfortunately, television being what it is, and it's your baby," said host Garry Moore, "we're out of time." Professing "eternal gratitude"--"We'd all be out of work if it weren't for you"--Moore gave him $80 in winnings and a carton of Winstons. Farnsworth flashed a smile as he left--or was it a grimace? The inventor deserved to be a legend like Edison, his hero. Instead, fate--abetted by the Radio Corp. of America--had reduced him to a game-show curiosity.
His dreams of glory had first been dreamt in an Idaho hayfield in 1921. The Mormon farm boy had read articles in popular technical magazines about early mechanical television systems ("Pictures That Could Fly Through the Air"). Experimenters in New York and abroad sought to scan images with a spinning perforated disk, send them through a wire or by radio, and reconstitute them with a second spinning disk into a fuzzy pattern of light and shadows. Young Farnsworth knew instinctively what it would take the pioneers of mechanical television another decade to learn: The disks would never spin fast enough to make a moving image sharp. A magnetized beam of electrons, however, could do the job, the 14-year-old decided. As he looked at the horizontal rows he had just cut in the hayfield with a horse-drawn harvester, he envisioned electrons following the same path on a viewing screen--scanning line by line at electronic speed--producing a picture the eye would see as solid and continuous.
Young Farnsworth's manner was self-effacing, his speech was halting. Yet when he talked about his hopes of inventing electronic television, he swelled with infectious confidence and the words tumbled out. At age 15, he convinced his high school chemistry teacher that his ideas would work. Bankers and other serious folk were impressed enough with him at age 19 to set him up in a small laboratory staffed by his young wife, her brother, and a couple of engineers. Working 12 hours a day and six days a week, the team blew glass for the tubes, sculpted metal, scavenged everywhere for usable components. In January 1927, Farnsworth filed his first patent application and come September 7, in a loft at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, he transmitted the first electronic television image in history. It was of a glass slide with a line drawn on it (a subsequent transmission teased his financial backers by showing a dollar sign). When Farnsworth gave reporters a look a year later, the image was blurry and no bigger than a postage stamp. Still, objects in the picture were seen to move.
Farnsworth, a high school graduate, was not yet aware of the man who would become his great rival for glory: Vladimir Zworykin, a brilliant Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Born into a wealthy family in Russia, Zworykin as a student had assisted a prominent St. Petersburg physicist in his experiments with early television. Zworykin had gone on to dream his own dreams about electronic TV years before Farnsworth's musing in his hayfield. In 1923, after immigrating to America and going to work for Westinghouse, he even sought a patent for an all-electronic system. But he was unable to build it. In 1925, he patched together a partly electronic system. It was so crude that his Westinghouse bosses told him to "work on something more useful." He found the moral support and deep pockets he needed in 1929: David Sarnoff, a go-getter about to become president of RCA, looked into the eyes behind Zworykin's thick glasses and felt sure he saw the glint of a winner.
In April 1930, Zworykin paid a call on Farnsworth at Green Street. The 23-year-old inventor, hoping for a patent-license deal, showed his 40-year-old visitor everything, including how to make one of his camera tubes. "This is a beautiful instrument," Zworykin said. "I wish I might have invented it." Zworykin knew he had a better receiver than Farnsworth. His cathode-ray picture tube would become a keystone of modern TV. Yet Zworykin's camera tube was inferior to Farnsworth's Image Dissector. At the new research lab he headed in Camden, N.J., Zworykin began experimenting with the Image Dissector. RCA's television system would evolve into a hybrid that borrowed from Farnsworth's designs, often improving them.
No sale. Sarnoff hated the thought that RCA, which owned all the important radio patents, might be denied a like advantage in its television operations ("The RCA doesn't pay patent royalties," he once said. "We collect them."). In early 1931, he turned up at the Green Street loft himself and offered to buy out Farnsworth Television for $100,000--the deal to include the exclusive services of the company's name partner. Farnsworth, however, indicated he had no wish to become a vassal in a corporate kingdom in which Sarnoff was king and Zworykin chancellor. Unaccustomed to traveling 3,000 miles to be rebuffed, Sarnoff uttered a face-saving exit line--"There is nothing here we'll need"--and caught the next train back to New York.
After that it was war--fought in the lab, in patent court, and in the court of public opinion. Farnsworth signed a pact with Philco, the nation's largest radio maker, under which it would be permitted to make TV receivers in return for bankrolling Farnsworth in a new laboratory in Philadelphia. Sarnoff scuttled the alliance by threatening to let Philco's crucial patent-license arrangements with RCA lapse. In 1934, Philadelphia's venerable Franklin Institute invited Farnsworth to stage at its new science museum the first public demonstration of electronic television. As visitors passed between classical columns into the marbled interior, they were delighted to glimpse themselves on a small TV screen. For 75 cents, the public was admitted to an auditorium where dogs and dancing girls performed on a screen wholly 1-foot wide. One evening, in a feat one reporter termed "another sensational achievement by the young inventor," the camera was aimed out the window to capture the rising moon.
Farnsworth's rising sun reached its noon the next year. The U.S. Patent Office awarded him "priority of invention on his system of television" (i.e., electronic television). He began transmitting entertainment programs experimentally in 1936. The rub was that fewer than 50 households--those of engineers or hobbyists who had built their own TV receivers--could tune in to see such fare as "Baby Delores," a singing and dancing 4-year-old, and the crooning of an 11-year-old girl dubbed "Little Miss Television." So the broadcasts, beamed from a Philadelphia suburb, added only to the debit side of the ledger. Farnsworth reorganized as Farnsworth Television and Radio in 1937 and began making radios to pay the bills until federal broadcast standards opened the way for commercial television. Even without such standards, Sarnoff seized the day in 1939. RCA, outspending Farnsworth many times over, launched commercial broadcasts at the New York World's Fair. While Sarnoff made headlines, Farnsworth struggled on the sidelines to overcome parsimonious partners, corporate red tape, too little capital, and his own insufficient business acumen.
Next, ending years of fruitless litigation aimed at shutting Farnsworth down and bypassing his patents, Sarnoff gritted his teeth and agreed to pay royalties. At last, television seemed about to become Farnsworth's fatted calf. But World War II spoiled the feast. The government suspended sales of TV sets for the duration. And when production resumed in 1946, Farnsworth's key patents were set to expire. The inventor had largely surrendered his hopes of shaping the future of television six years earlier. He had taken refuge in Maine, pouring nearly all of the family's savings into a rural retreat. Feeling used up at 33, he sought relief from depression in strong drink and chemical sedatives. He brought on instead a nervous breakdown, a spell in a sanitarium, and shock therapy. His place in Maine burned to the ground in 1947. His place in history was burned to the ground at about the same time, the match struck by RCA's ample army of publicists. Never mind Farnsworth's pesky patents--Zworykin and Sarnoff presented themselves as the fathers of TV. In the glow of RCA's postwar success as a pioneer of commercial television, the ex-plowboy whom 1930s press accounts had labeled a "genius" was forgotten.
When Farnsworth Television, mismanaged and stumbling, was taken over by ITT in 1949, Farnsworth stayed on as a vice president. But the company and he were out of the TV business. He developed a new obsession--harnessing nuclear fusion as a peaceful energy source. He mortgaged his home and sold stock holdings to finance this quest, which went nowhere. In the years after Farnsworth's death in 1971, the long lens of history began bringing his contributions back into focus. The U.S. Postal Service put him on a stamp in 1983; the Inventors' Hall of Fame inducted him in 1984 (seven years after Zworykin). Their rivalries aside, Farnsworth and Zworykin in the end felt the same about how the medium of television had turned out: They loathed it and ordered their children not to waste time watching.
Milestones
1949 Community Antenna Television, the forerunner of cable, begins operating. CATV brings TV to the Appalachians and to Pacific Northwest mountain areas unable to receive line-of-sight signals.
1954 Regular color TV broadcasts start. RCA's problem-plagued early color sets flop with the public, but sales take off in the 1960s when better, bigger sets become available from several manufacturers.
1956 Ampex builds a practical videocassette recorder, the VRX-1000. CBS inaugurates tape-delayed broadcasts, scheduling Douglas Edwards and the News later for the Western states.
1965 The first commercial telecommunications satellite, Early Bird (Intelsat I), is launched. Broadcasters can now transmit live coverage of news and sports. Vietnam becomes a "living-room war."
1975 Sony introduces Betamax, the first home-use videocassette recorder using 1/2-inch tape. VHS, eventual winner in the format wars, launches in 1976. The first home color TV video cameras are sold in 1977.
1996 A high-definition-TV signal is broadcast in Washington, D.C., test. Broadcasters, TV manufacturers, and computer makers set standards. (First broadcasts set for November 1998.)
With Richard A. Folkers
This story appears in the August 17, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.