A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DPhilo T. ( Taylor) Farnsworth : 1906 - 1971
Philo Taylor Farnsworth, (b. Beaver, Utah, Aug. 19, 1906, d. Mar. 11, 1971), was a U.S. research engineer and executive who was a pioneer in TELEVISION. Farnsworth was a 15-year-old high school student when he designed his first television system. Six years later he obtained his first patent. In 1935 he demonstrated his complete television system. Farnsworth held 165 patents, mostly in radio and television. He founded and spent his career as head of the Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation and its successors.
Philo Taylor Farnsworth, specialist in cathode-ray tubes as applied to television, first became interested in electricity through a farm lighting system and its electric motors. Popular magazines told him of "such a thing called television," and he linked his life work to it. Farnsworth was described by a friend as "an omnivorous reader of scientific literature. While at Rigby (Idaho) high school, 1921-22, he delved into the molecular theory of matter, electrons, the Einstein theory, automobile engines, model airplanes and chemistry. He went to Glen Falls, Idaho in 1923 as an electrician on a railroad, then to Provo, Utah to work in a machine shop. He attended high school in Provo in the fall of 1923 and devoted spare time to study in the library maintained by Brigham Young University. In 1924 he enrolled in the University, but at the end of the second year, his father died and young Farnsworth left college to help support the family. He entered the radio business at Salt Lake City as a serviceman, but the shop failed and he went to work in the railroad yards. To Farnsworth, television was still "a day-dream, a day-dream only." He had no laboratory or facilities for research or money to buy equipment. One day in applying for a job in connection with the Salt Lake City Community Chest campaign, he met Leslie Gorrell and George Everson of San Francisco, who were conducting the drive. Farnsworth was hired. As the men became acquainted it was natural that they should learn about television from the young man. This was a turning point. Everson agreed to finance the idea. A laboratory was set up in Los Angeles. In October, 1926, with additional financial assistance, they established the Crocker Research Laboratories in San Francisco "to take all the moving parts out of television." The idea conceived in 1922 was brought to a practical result in 1927 when a sixty-line image of a dollar sign was the first image Farnsworth transmitted. ( Note: Compare these dates to the 1923 start of Scotsman J. L. Baird on development of his mechanical TV system, and showing it for the first time in February, 1927, and Zworykin's first patent application for the basis of his iconoscope while a university graduate student in December, 1923. Farnsworth with his notion in 1922 at age 16 was truly a child prodigy by comparison.) The company was reorganized as Television Laboratories, Inc.; and later in May, 1929 was renamed Farnsworth Television, Inc. of California. Farnsworth's first application for a patent cover a complete electronic television system, including an "image dissector tube." was made January 7, 1927. The image dissector was used to scan the image for transmission. At the receiver, an "oscillite" tube reproduced the picture. An electron multiplier tube, which Farnsworth called a "multipactor," increased the sensitivity of the image dissector. In 1931 he moved his experiments to Wyndmoor, near Philadelphia. The Farnsworth Radio and Television Corporation was organized in 1938 with headquarters at Fort Wayne, Indiana, with E.A. Nicholas as president, and Farnsworth as director of research. His numerous patents, associated with the idea of converting and optical image into an electrical image, deal with cathode-ray tubes, electrical scanners, amplifier tubes, photoelectric materials and electron multipliers. "It is an intriguing art," remarked Farnsworth. "Why, it is difficult for me to make an accurate guess as to what originally got me started. I believe I had decided before I was twelve that I could be an inventor."
Philo Taylor Farnsworth's electronic inventions took all of the moving parts out of televisions and made possible today's TV industry, the TV shots from the moon, and satellite pictures. Born in Beaver, Utah, Farnsworth, was educated in the Utah and Idaho public school systems and while at Rigby (Idaho) High School in 1921 delved into the molecular theory of matter, electrons and the Einstein theory. He also studied automobile engines and chemistry. Farnsworth attended high school at Provo in the fall of 1923 and in 1924 enrolled in Brigham Young University. He left the university at the end of his second year due to the death of his father. In 1926 Farnsworth joined the Crocker Research Laboratories in San Francisco. At the age of 20 he produced the first all-electronic television image. Crocker Research Laboratories was later reorganized as Television Laboratories, Inc., and in May 1929 was renamed Farnsworth Television Inc., of California. Farnsworth's basic television patents covered scanning, focusing, synchronizing, contrast, controls, and power. He also invented the first cold cathode ray tubes and the first simple electronic microscope. He used radio waves to get direction ( later called radar) and black light for seeing at night ( used in World War II). During the 1960s he worked on special-purpose TV, missiles, and the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Before his death, he worked on a nuclear fusion process to produce clean, virtually unlimited energy; he held two fusion energy patents. When he died at age 64, he held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents. He was one of four inventors honored in September 1983 by the U.S. Postal Service with issuance of a stamp bearing his portrait.
Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906 in Indian Creek, a hamlet near Beaver, Utah. He had little education after high school other than two years at Brigham Young University, yet he is the father of the electronic television. His fascination with electricity began early in life, and he read every book or magazine he could find on the subject. This obsession led to his tinkering with his family's farm generator as well as his mother's sewing machine and her washer. In 1919 Farnsworth's first recognition as an inventor came as a $25 first-place prize from the magazine Science and Invention. The prize was awarded for the best original invention, and Farnsworth's winning entry was a thief-proof ignition switch. By the time Farnsworth was fifteen, he had developed a theory for the electronic transmission of pictures. He had seen a description in a magazine of an early television that used a crude rotating disc as a scanner, but found it to be too clumsy. Farnsworth instead believed that only electricity could move fast enough to be effective in rendering pictures. His idea was comparable to an electrified pointillist painting. Just as Georges Seurat used hundreds of tiny colored dots to form images, Farnsworth used electrons diffused over a screen. He believed that by controlling the speed and direction of the electrons he could transform electricity into pictures. As he set out to discover the secrets of the electron, the television tube evolved. In February 1922 Farnsworth drew an "image dissector" for his teacher Justin Tolmna. This sketch later would help Farnsworth obtain his legal right to the patent for the invention of the television. By 1926 Farnsworth and his friend George Everson had obtained financial backing for their research from a group of San Francisco investors. This funding allowed their research to pursue an electronic scanning and receiving system. Farnsworth had no experience with high-vacuum physics, but came up with a way to seal a flat lens end on a dissector camera tube and create in it a very high vacuum. The result of his hard work came on 7 September 1927 as he demonstrated a camera, a synchronization system, and a receiver. He had patented and produced the first operational, all-electronic television system. Unfortunately, Farnsworth was not the only practitioner in the field who expected to reap rich rewards. He ended up battling with RCA over patent rights and won. With the Farnsworth Company, he managed to make $2.5 million before he sold the company to International Telephone and Telegraph; however, the money was soon gone due to free spending. Worn out by trying to obtain funding to perfect his inventions, and weakened by illness, Farnsworth died in debt in 1971 at the age of sixty-four. In addition to television, Farnsworth's experiments also contributed to the development of radar, electron microscopes, incubators for newborn infants, and guidance systems for aircraft. See also: Elma G. Farnsworth, A Distant Vision, 1990
On Sept. 7, 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth scrawled in his journal perhaps the most understated report of the century: "The received line picture was evident this time." Over the next 70 years that line picture would morph into "Leave It to Beaver", man's first steps on the moon, the Vietnam War, the shooting of J.R., the beating of Rodney King, MTV, CNN and the chase of O.J. Simpson. Farnsworth, a 20-year-old college dropout, had created the first electronic television. Earlier TV devices had been based on an 1884 invention called the scanning disk, patented by Paul Nipkow. Riddled with holes, the large disk spun in front of an object while a photoelectric cell recorded changes in light. Depending on the electricity transmitted by the photoelectric cell, an array of light bulbs would glow or remain dark. Though Nipkow's mechanical system could not scan and deliver a clear, live-action image, most would-be TV inventors still hoped to perfect it. Not Philo Farnsworth. In 1921 the 14-year-old Mormon had an epiphany while working on his father's Idaho farm. Mowing hay in rows, Philo realized an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. It would prove to be a critical breakthrough. But young Philo was not alone. At the same time, Russian immigrant Vladimir Zworykin had also designed a camera that focused an image through a lens onto an array of photoelectric cells coating the end of a tube. The electrical image formed by the cells would be scanned line-by-line by an electron beam and transmitted to a cathode-ray tube. Rather than an electron beam, Farnsworth's image dissector device used an "anode finger", a pencil-sized tube with a small aperture at the end to scan the picture. Magnetic coils sprayed the electrons emitted from the electrical image left to right and line by line onto the aperture, where they became electric current. Both Zworykin's and Philo's devices then transmitted the current to a cathode-ray tube, which recreated the image by scanning it onto a fluorescent surface. David Sarnoff, vice president of the powerful Radio Corporation of America, later hired Zworykin to ensure that RCA would control television technology. Zworykin and Sarnoff visited Farnsworth's cluttered laboratory, but the Mormon inventor's business manager scoffed at selling the company, and Farnsworth's services, to RCA for only $100,000. So Sarnoff haughtily downplayed the importance of Philo's innovations, saying, "There's nothing here we'll need." In 1934 RCA demonstrated its "iconoscope," a camera tube very similar to Farnsworth's image dissector. RCA claimed it was based on a device Zworykin tried to patent in 1923, even though the Russian had used Nipkow's old spinning disk design up until the time he visited Farnsworth's lab. The patent wars had truly begun, and Philo, as the grown-up Farnsworth preferred to be called, was in a bind. He could not license his inventions while the matter was in court, and he wrestled with his backers over control and direction of his own company. The men in Farnsworth's loyal "lab gang" were fired and rehired several times during his financial ups and downs, but retained confidence in Philo. When Farnsworth's financiers refused his request for a broadcasting studio, the inventor and a partner built a studio on their own. Meanwhile, back at RCA, Sarnoff had spent more than $10 million on a major TV R & D effort. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Sarnoff announced the launch of commercial television, though RCA's camera was inadequate, and the corporation didn't own a single TV patent. Later that same year, the company was compelled to pay patent royalties to Farnsworth Radio and Television. As Sarnoff's vice president in charge of patents signed the contracts, tears welled in his eyes. The next day newspapers described RCA's blunder as "Sarnoff's folly." By the time World War II began, Philo and his wife, Pem, were living on a farm in Maine. Farnsworth realized that commercial television's future was in the hands of businessmen, not a lone inventor toiling in his lab. In 1949 he reluctantly agreed to sell off Farnsworth Radio and Television. In the 1950s and '60s Philo pursued a new vision: nuclear fusion as an energy source. The Farnsworths mortgaged their home and cashed in their life insurance policies to fund his obsession. But Philo's second breakthrough never came. The inventor of television died of pneumonia in 1971. Philo Farnsworth Jr. summed up his father's life as "a romance with the electron." But Johnny Carson's eulogy was much closer to home: "If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth ...we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners."
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