Both the readers of this blog know that I’m old. I’m older than a lot of things. I’m not quite older than television, but pretty close. Television didn’t come to Oklahoma, the state I where I was born until I was about 7 or 8 years old. If you’re interested, you can check the archives of this blog for stories about the early days of television in Maysville, Oklahoma.
Television was an interest of mine from an early age and I was very interested how it worked. TV sets today are pretty big and very thin — almost like a big picture frame. But until fairly recently, a television set was very bulky and took up a large chunk of whatever room it was in. The basic reason for that was the screen was something called a cathode ray tube and in order for that to work, the TV set had to be almost as deep as the screen was wide.
Anyhow, my subject today is a guy by the name of Philo T. Farnsworth. Philo invented something that pretty much changed the world.
But — his invention is something that most people have never heard of. And most people never even heard of Philo T. Farnsworth either. The invention? The dissection tube — it’s actually the thing that made televisions, until recently, work.
Phil was the son of a Mormon farmer. His family moved from Utah to Idaho in 1919 when he was 11 years old. He was surprised that their new home was wired for electricity (and on top of that, it had a flush toilet.) Phil became obsessed with all things electrical.
By the time he was 13, he was a self-taught electrical engineer. And he was invaluable around the farm. When a generator blew, Philo came to the rescue, and he built motors from spare parts. He devoured newspaper and magazine articles about new ideas in electricity — and thought of ways he could improve on those ideas himself.
What would turn out to be his life’s work was inspired by an article about Scottish inventor John Logie Baird and his work with cathode rays. Baird had been attempting to reproduce real images on a screen but so far hadn’t been able to produce anything but blurs of light. Right from the start, Philo was obsessed with the transmission of images onto a screen.
One day, while plowing a field, the thought came to him that electrons could scan an image line by line, just like his plow was working through a field. It took Philo another seven years to translate his idea into a working television system. On September 7, 1927, he successfully sent a single line from his camera — which he called an image dissector — to some friends that were looking at a glass receiver tube. That was the first-ever transmission of an electronic television picture.
Within a few years, Philo was involved in a legal battle with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA.) The company didn’t want to pay Farnsworth royalties to produce television sets, so they instigated a legal battle over who was the rightful inventor of television — a Russian immigrant they’d hired (Valdmir Zworykin) — or Farnsworth. After a lot of analysis and testimony, the U.S. Patent Office awarded the invention to Farnsworth.
In 1957 Philo appeared as a mystery guest on the quiz show, What’s My Line? He was introduced as someone with a unique claim to fame. A panel of four people were supposed to figure out exactly what that was. When asked if he was the inventor of something that could be painful when used, Philo said, “Yes. Sometimes it’s most painful.”
Philo believed that he had created a way for people to waste a large portion of their lives. He wouldn’t allow his own children to watch television because he thought it would ruin their “intellectual diet.”
Maybe he was right.
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