Philo Farnsworth, the Forgotten Inventor On September 7, 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, inventor Philo Farnsworth and a small team of assistants placed a slide containing an image of a triangle in front of a machine Farnsworth called an Image Dissector, and then gathered around a receiving tube on the other side of a partition. As they watched, one line of the triangle appeared in a small bluish square of light on the receiver. At Farnsworth’s instructions, someone rotated the slide. As if by magic, the image of the line on the receiver turned as well. “That’s it, folks!” Farnsworth exclaimed. “We’ve done it! There you have electronic television!” As Farnsworth refined his device, he surely thought that fame and fortune awaited him. It wasn’t to be. Russian immigrant Vladimir Zworykin, who had also been trying to develop a television system, claimed that he was the true inventor of TV. Zworykin worked for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which began to sell television sets and broadcast programs. Years of legal battles followed, and though the U.S. Patent Office sided with Farnsworth, he lost other lawsuits, and years passed before RCA paid him for his work. Farnsworth never received much public recognition for his world-changing invention. Ironically, he appeared on national television only once. In 1957, he was a mystery guest on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret. A panel of celebrities peppered him with questions about his secret, but failed to guess what it was: “I invented electronic television.” His prize for stumping the panel was $80 and a carton of cigarettes. Nearly two decades after Farnsworth’s death, his home state of Utah placed a statue of him in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. On the statue’s base are inscribed the words Father of Television.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 13:12:46 +0000
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