Philo Taylor Farnsworth

1906-1971

American Inventor

Philo T. Farnsworth is one of several individuals who invented the television, although his role in the development of the television camera is sometimes overlooked. He was a lifelong inventor and was the holder of 165 patents during his lifetime.

Once the transmission of sound by radio was accomplished in the early twentieth century, it was not difficult to imagine transmitting a series of pictures that would be interpreted as a moving picture by the viewer. Indeed, the first steps in this direction were achieved in the eighteenth century. A primitive facsimile transmission line operated between Paris and Lyons, France, between 1865 and 1870. In 1884, Dr. Paul Nipkow (1860-1940) of Berlin received a patent for a picture transmission system based on a two spinning perforated disks. Light from the scene being transmitted would pass through one of the spinning holes and be collected by a photocell. The voltage produced would carry the information to a light source behind a second spinning disk, synchronized with the first, and fall on a screen which then could be viewed. Although this mechanical method had many flaws and did not produce a very good image, it was commercialized in England by the British engineer John Logie Baird (1888-1946).

In 1922 the sixteen-year-old Farnsworth showed one of his high school teachers his idea to replace the spinning disk with an electronic scanning system. With his teacher's encouragement he began work on his ideas. After two years as a student at Brigham Young University, he moved to California to devote full time to his invention. In 1927 he successfully transmitted several sixty-line images. He received a patent for his electronic camera tube in 1930.

Also working on an electronic picture transmission system was Vladimir K. Zworykin (1889-1982), a Russian immigrant who had filed a patent application in 1923 for a primitive electronic television camera. In 1930, he left his job at Westinghouse, where people were unimpressed with his ideas about television, to work for the Radio Corporation of America. RCA was willing to invest a substantial amount of money to develop this new technology. That same year, Zworykin visited Farnsworth and concluded that RCA was on its way to a superior system that would not infringe on Farnsworth's patents. RCA's lawyers thought differently, however, and tried to buy the rights to Farnsworth's patent. Farnsworth was unwilling to accept a lump sum payment but was willing to sell for a royalty on RCA's income from television. RCA was unwilling to do this, however, as it thought, correctly, that there was a tremendous amount of money to be made in television, and it did not want to forego a fixed percentage. RCA tried until 1939 to get Farnsworth to accept a flat sum but eventually agreed to pay a royalty, the first time the company had done so.

The same year, RCA introduced commercial electronic television at the New York World's Fair, selling sets to a few hundred wealthy New Yorkers during the year. Both Zworykin and Farnsworth had made improvements to their original design by that time. Because RCA devoted so much of its effort to publicity and marketing, Farnsworth is often omitted when the story of its invention is told. Farnsworth, nonetheless, produced numerous other inventions, earning 165 patents over his lifetime. Farnsworth, a Mormon and native of Utah, is memorialized as the Father of Television in a statue erected by the State of Utah in Washington, D.C.

DONALD R. FRANCESCHETTI