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IP: Philo T. Farnsworth and the birth of television
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 14:23:46 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: Ari Ollikainen <Ari () OLTECO com> Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 10:42:05 -0700 To: farber () cis upenn edu Subject: Philo T. Farnsworth and the birth of television A fascinating article AND a fascinating book! Q&A: Evan I. Schwartz Author of "The Last Lone Inventor" talks about Philo T. Farnsworth and the birth of television D.F. Tweney, Special to SF Gate Thursday, June 13, 2002 San Francisco, California, USA -- One clear day in September 1927, in a small San Francisco laboratory, a brainy 21-year-old Utah farm boy demonstrated the first electronic television broadcast. But the name Philo T. Farnsworth never became a household word. His efforts to bring television to market were thwarted by David Sarnoff, the hard-charging president of RCA, who managed through deceit, trickery and drawn-out litigation to delay television's commercial debut until 1939 -- largely to protect RCA's then-booming radio business. By the time TV really took off in the 1950s, Farnsworth was all but forgotten, and RCA had become a TV powerhouse. This intriguing tale is revealed in "The Last Lone Inventor," a newly published book by Evan I. Schwartz (HarperCollins, 322pp., $24.95). Schwartz, who also wrote the early dot-com classic "Webonomics," visited San Francisco recently to talk about Farnsworth, Sarnoff and the birth of television. [...] SF Gate: Farnsworth was only 14 when he first conceived the idea for television. How did he get from that moment of insight to his first working prototype? Schwartz: He was inspired by the great lone inventors like Edison, Bell, Morse and the Wright brothers. He was reading every science book he could find, and memorized Einstein's photoelectric theory, which won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921. That was the same exact year that Farnsworth was out plowing the potato fields, looking at the parallel lines in the field. That was his "Eureka!" moment, that the only way to transmit these images was to scan electrons [in parallel lines], use them to represent the changing light patterns then transmit that signal through the air like radio. The first successful demonstration of television was in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927, when he was 21 years old. He unveiled it to the press a year later, and the Chronicle broke the story. He had the press conference on a Saturday, and I guess no one else showed up. Public relations was not his forte. Sarnoff, sitting in his office in the Woolworth Building [in New York City] -- which was the tallest building in the world at that time -- when he read the story, he started devising his plan to steal the idea, or at least delay television, because otherwise it would topple his radio empire. SF Gate: How did RCA respond once it heard Farnsworth had demonstrated television in his San Francisco lab? Schwartz: Sarnoff started secretly funding Vladimir Zworykin's research at Westinghouse. Zworykin had a Ph.D. in physics from the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in Russia, and he also believed in the electronic approach to television. But Zworykin was making very slow progress, so in April 1930, Sarnoff sent Zworykin to the Green Street laboratory. Well, Zworykin arrived in April 1930 for three days. Farnsworth and his backers showed him everything. They treated him very cordially, because they hoped to license their patents to Westinghouse -- they didn't know that he was working with Sarnoff. Zworykin held up Farnsworth's image-dissector tube, which was the first electronic television camera, and said, "This is a beautiful instrument. I wish I had invented it myself." Then he went back to Pittsburgh, at Westinghouse, where he attempted to build a crude replica of Farnsworth's image-dissector tube. He then took it directly to David Sarnoff, who put Zworykin to work at RCA Laboratories in New Jersey -- and the race was on to develop a commercially viable television. [...] URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/06/1 3/eschwartz.DTL _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ You can't depend on your judgement when your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ OLTECO Ari Ollikainen P.O. BOX 20088 Networking Architecture and Technology Stanford, CA Ari () OLTECO com 94309-0088 415.517.3519 ------ End of Forwarded Message For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- IP: Philo T. Farnsworth and the birth of television Dave Farber (Jun 13)