IP: Philo T. Farnsworth and the birth of television

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ 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

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                                  -- Mark Twain.
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        OLTECO                    Ari Ollikainen
        P.O. BOX 20088            Networking Architecture and Technology
        Stanford, CA              Ari () OLTECO com
        94309-0088                415.517.3519


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