Philo T. Farnsworth

Reconstructing an American Myth

 

As I sit down to write this, the first thing I do is flip open the monitor on my laptop. Thousands of tiny, little colored dots spring to life and once again I’m staring into a digital interface. Off in the near distance, a television flickers out the latest Giant’s broadcast, and as cliché would dictate, they are losing. I suddenly feel somewhat surrounded by projected light: screens, displays, and monitors. Where did they come from? Why are they everywhere? And whose big idea was it to transmit pictures in the first place?

I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I like to think of myself as culturally literate as the next guy. Like all decent Americans, I know who invented the light bulb, and the airplane, and the industrial assembly line. In this country, people like Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, and Henry Ford are regarded as heroes, historical legends of monumental importance. They are living proof and validation of our very way of life, and we need them.

Americans have long subscribed to the general ideology that through genius and innovation, both the individual and society can accomplish anything. From the industrial revolution to the atomic age, Americans have celebrated each and every one of our major technological leaps. But what about the television? Surely an invention of such magnitude would have an inventor’s name associated with it, and burned in the public’s collective consciousness.

Surprisingly, no. My ignorance regarding the origins of TV is sadly commonplace. But within this fact lies an intriguing story - a classic American tale of invention, greed and deceit. It is the story of Philo T. Farnsworth, and it starts in Utah, 1906.

 Philo T. Farnsworth grew up as a humble Mormon farmer in a single-room log cabin on an isolated homestead in Northwest Utah. There was no radio, telephone or electricity. Conditions were difficult, and Philo faced many of the hardships of rural farm life. Responsibilities were handed to him at an early age, and young Philo always rose to the occasion. His parents described him as a very organized child, serious and methodical.

Late at night, and when the daily chores were finally done, Philo would turn his imagination to the burgeoning field of electrical science. He spent his nights, studying over the latest electrical journals like “Science and Invention” by candlelight. Many of these journals were filled with articles from engineering teams around the world, each reporting their progress in the global quest to invent a technology to project images over a distance.

Fueled by the recent success of radio, the world’s top engineers largely believed in the potential for television. As a result, several unique and ill-conceived approaches were introduced. From bent mirrors to spinning discs, scientists tested even the most questionably plausible theories.

The quest to invent an image projection system was of particular interest to Philo. He was captivated by the radical new ideas involved with the transmission and reception of visual media, and spent much of his time conceptualizing the logistics of such an invention. By age twelve, Philo developed a solid understanding of the science behind many of the most complicated television theories. In addition, he also became interested in the seemingly unrelated field of vacuum technology, especially glass tubes called iconoscopes.

As a self-taught whiz kid, Philo became known as a local prodigy. He developed a reputation as a mechanic and handyman, able to fix nearly unfixable equipment. His little Mormon farming community quickly grew to appreciate Philo, and expected big things from this boy genius.

Then one fateful day, inspiration struck. After a long and arduous day of field plowing, Philo slowly made his way back to the farmhouse. With visions of spinning discs and electro-vacuum tubes running through his young, 14 year old head, Philo stared down at his days work. Below him were perfectly straight crop lines, freshly plowed and well defined. Philo stared at the lines, each one stack on top of the other. As he stared at the straight, parallel lines, Philo envisioned a system of scanning a visual image line by line and transmitting it to a remote screen. He ran home and immediately began sketching out ideas.

Later that year, Philo brought his crude diagrams of an early television camera tube to his 9^th grade science teacher. The diagrams clearly illustrated exactly how the cathode rays and electromagnetic waves combined to create a single line of electrified colored gas. His teacher admittedly didn’t fully understand the principals behind Philo’s drawings, but he recognized the overall potential in the young student’s idea and entered the diagrams in a local science fair, where they won an award for most original concept. These exact diagrams and the time in which they were made, coupled with the 9^th grade teacher’s testimony, would become very important to Philo later in life.

By the time he finished high school, Philo was completely committed to pursuing his idea for a picture tube. He believed that television would bring humanity together in such a new way, as to cure many of society’s ills. To Philo, the television revolution would usher in a new era of communication, clarity and eventual prosperity. His motivations transcended simple financial rewards. Philo honestly believed in the unending benefits of television. To that end, the pursuit of this invention became an obsession to him, one that would dictate the entire course of his life.

In 1926, at the age of 20, Philo married his high school sweetheart and moved to San Francisco. After a few impassioned presentations, he was able to secure investment funding, and set up a lab on downtown’s Green Street. In fact, to this day, there is a plague on the lab’s outer wall that commemorates the location’s historical importance.

In less than a year, Philo, with the aid of his lab assistant, his wife, and her drunken, burdensome brother (who as it turns out, happened to have a previously unrealized and uncanny ability to blow glass, and became an important part of Philo’s team in developing the best possible vacuum tubes), produced the first all-electronic television image. It was a landmark achievement, and Farnsworth’s work quickly garnished the unbridled attention of the scientific community.

One man was especially interested in Farnsworth’s television. His name was David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant who was president of the National Broadcast Company (NBC) and CEO of Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Sarnoff was easily the most powerful man in broadcasting, with an iron grip on the radio industry.

David Sarnoff guided both companies through tough financial times by securing all the patent rights to radio technology. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, and devoted his life to the corporations he served. In an almost Hollywood fashion reminiscent of Citizen Cane, Sarnoff betrayed his dear friend of 40 years, Howard Armstrong.

Armstrong was RCA’s chief electronic engineer, and inventor of frequency modulation technology (FM radio). Sarnoff refused to develop FM, because he believed the transition would cost the radio industry too much. Besides, Sarnoff was more concerned with the new picture technology. He was convinced that television would be the next big cash cow, and was determined to make sure that RCA ruled TV much like it did radio. When Armstrong tried to continue his work with FM radio by starting his own lab, Sarnoff crushed him by refusing Armstrong access to his own patents. Armstrong struggled through the legalities of corporate copyright policies, spent his entire fortune, and eventually threw himself out of a 12 story building. Sarnoff was reported to have wept wildly at the funeral, and insisted that his policy against Armstrong was ‘just business’.

This brief back story into the life of David Sarnoff helps establish him as the quintessential American villain, one which embodies all the qualities of an early 20^th century bad guy. As a overly powerful man in his office at the top of the Empire State building, Sarnoff ruled his companies like a dictator, and was obsessed with maintaining his communication empire. In short, he was the perfect CEO, and when he turned his passion to television, it wasn’t long before he collided with Farnsworth. What resulted was a classic American tale akin to David versus Goliath, where the struggle of the American dream against large corporate interests is played out against a highly dramatic backdrop.

Unknown to Farnsworth, Sarnoff was focusing his Machiavellian attention onto the little lab on Green street. Still reeling from his early successes, Philo began his own company, Farnco, and began to increase his staff. This addition to the team opened a vulnerability that Sarnoff was quick to  exploit. In later testimony, it came out that Sarnoff hired operatives to take advantage of some of Farnco’s newer employees, and even planted spies. Before Farnsworth could release a single product to the public, Sarnoff was already prepared to thwart these efforts.

In 1923, two years after Philo’s first patents, Sarnoff hired a fellow Russian Jewish immigrant name Vladimir Kosma Zworykin. Zworykin was a promising student at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, and lead developer of a new technology referred to as “electrical telescopy”. Sarnoff figured Zworykin to be his ace in the hole. With Zworykin on the RCA television development team, Sarnoff had an easier time translating and implementing the information gleaned from his spying efforts. In the end, the credibility Zworykin brought to RCA was eventually exploited, and he became an unwilling pawn in Sarnoff’s deceitful attempt to establish the RCA Research and Development team as television’s true inventor.

No stranger to corporate hardball, David Sarnoff began a public relations campaign directed at completely discrediting Farnco, and Philo personally. Sarnoff began issuing statements that the television was way too complicated to be the invention of one single man, and was instead the result of years of lab development. Sarnoff maintained that dozens of scientists at RCA were the inventors of television, and gambled that Farnsworth wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise.

These claims did two separate things. First, they marked the beginning of an epic court action between RCA and Philo Farnsworth that would span many decades. Secondly, and maybe more importantly, Sarnoff destroyed any potential for a great American myth based on Farnsworth, and replaced it with his own version, a self-serving falsehood. And in this effort, Sarnoff was successful. By the time televisions hit the public market, Farnsworth was already drifting in obscurity. Even today, most people have never heard of Philo T. Farnsworth, and many believed that RCA invented the television.

Robbed of his place in history, Farnsworth was determined to fight Sarnoff’s hostile attempts to essentially steal his work. Like Armstrong, the creator of FM radio and Sarnoff’s dear friend, Farnsworth sank his entire savings into a legal fight with RCA. Until that time, RCA had been brought up on several anti-trust cases, but had never lost a single one. Despite their open reputation for aggressive corporate tactics, RCA controlled every patent they laid claim too.

However, Sarnoff would soon suffer his first major defeat. Unlike Armstrong who earlier failed to prove his ownership of FM radio, Farnsworth had a community of supporters. One such advocate was Philo’s old 9^th grade teacher, who’s testimony helped establish Farnsworth as the legitimate father of television. In addition, the teacher also produced the actual diagrams that Philo had drawn decades earlier. These diagrams made by Philo as a 14 year old child were the deciding factor in the patent case, and RCA lost. For the first time in the company’s history, RCA would have to pay a license fee in order to manufacture a product. It was a giant victory for the American underdog, and Philo lived the rest of his life a wealthy man.

However, this story isn’t necessarily a happy one. It shows how easily a myth can be manufactured, even on a grand national scale. The work and imagination of one man was nearly trampled, and all in the name of capital expansion and corporate ambition. Instead of celebrating Farnsworth, and including him in our cultural lexicon right up there with Edison and Einstein, he has fallen through the gaps of history. One man’s legacy erased by another man’s greed and paranoia.

What we as a society are left with is a compelling narrative with real characters. The story is a reflection of our own capitalistic values, and helps to show the roots of these values. We are forced to question, has anything changed? Bill Gates, leader of computer software giant Microsoft, is rumored to embody many of the same characteristics of Sarnoff. Only time will reveal the David versus Goliath myths that are being created and manufactured in this modern context. I’m sure many of the same themes from Farnsworth’s time still apply. As television pioneer Charles Francis Jenkins described, “It’s the old story over again. The inventor gets the experience and the capitalist gets the invention.”

Perhaps this relationship between individual inventor and the exploitative corporate structure is a viable dynamic to the survival of our capitalistic way of life. If that’s true, then society must be made aware that the myths surrounding both characters (in this case, inventor and CEO) may be biased. The collective public consciousness deserves this awareness, and is entitled to manufacture its own myths, based on available information. After all, there is nothing truly gained by mass deception in a free and open society, other than the selfish needs of a select few.

So the next time you turn on your television, computer, video camera or any other similar display, think of Philo Farnsworth. Take pride in the fact that a fellow citizen and human being rose to a particular challenge and was successful, much to all of our benefit. Think about how a young man fulfilled his American dream, only to have it doused by a larger, corporate counterpart. Understand that this struggle is a part of the American process, and is probably occurring now with characters of equal importance. Appreciate the relationship between our own innovations, motivations, and deceptions, and of course, the inevitable end result.

Armed with this knowledge and wisdom, we as a society can make better, and more informed choices, allowing us to fully benefit from our own legends and heroes. We can lift ourselves away from the manipulations of the David Sarnoff’s of the world, and never let another brilliant underdog like Philo T. Farnsworth slip from history again.