[South Florida DX Association] THOUGHTS ON THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION

[Bill]

**** From Bill NA2M

THOUGHTS ON THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION
*Philo Taylor Farnsworth* (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971)


  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth


  http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarnsworth.htm


  http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/farnsworth.html


  http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/farnsworth.htm

As evolving sentient beings we are drawn to exploration, discovery, and 
a desire to encounter and probe the unknown.  We long for revelation, to 
experience the apocryphal Archimedian “Eureka” moments.  In the summer 
of 1921 a fourteen-year-old Idaho farm boy named Philo T. Farnsworth 
looking back at the just plowed furrow lines in a field experienced such 
a moment.  The scientific prodigy was obsessed with discovering the 
means to transmit and reproduce a live image.  Looking at the repeating 
parallel lines in the field, Farnsworth realized that a beam of electron 
particles could scan a picture in horizontal lines and then reproduce 
that image.  The word “television” had been coined in 1900 by the 
Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi in a paper he read at the First 
International Congress of Electricity in Paris.  The word was derived 
from the Greek word for “distant” and the Latin for “seeing.”  By the 
Fall of 1921,  Farnsworth had drawn for Justin Tolman, his high school 
chemistry teacher, a diagram of an Image Dissector Tube for a prototype 
electronic television system.  In his subsequent effort to develop a 
functioning machine Farnsworth was swept into an epic struggle with 
David Sarnoff, a refuge from a Russian pogrom, later a visionary media 
mogul, who foresaw television’s potential as a lucrative cultural and 
scientific phenomenon.  Either fairly or unfairly portrayed in some 
books as a Machiavellian figure, Sarnoff once observed that, 
“competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”  
In that observation, David Sarnoff perfectly described himself....




Early sketch of Farnsworth’s Image Dissector.

Source: /Distant Vision,
/by Elma G. Farnsworth,
PemberlyKent Publishers, Inc.,
Salt Lake, Utah, 1990.

Philo T. Farnsworth invented electronic television when he was a high 
school student in rural Utah. He is shown here with his dissector tube 
and a 1929 receiver. NBC reluctantly licensed his patents and at age 
twenty-three Farnsworth was a prototype of the American Dream. Source: 
/Please Stand By - A Prehistory of Television/, by Michael Ritchie, The 
Overlook Press, New York, 1994.

Aaron Sorkin, creator of the Emmy Award-winning series, /The West Wing,/ 
and the author of *The Farnsworth Invention*, was drawn to  this race to 
create an operable television and the competition for the patent rights 
to the technology and the control of television’s future. But Sorkin has 
avoided creating a stage version of a David and Goliath struggle, a 
reductive battle between the forces of light and darkness or a costume 
drama about the history of television. His intention is more subtle. In 
a National Public Radio interview Sorkin shared that, “Both characters 
have a utopian vision for what television could be…And we already know 
the punch line of that joke. So for me it’s not a story about 
television.  It’s an optimistic story about the spirit of exploration.”  
It’s all of that, but *The Farnsworth Invention* is also most surely a 
cautionary tale about the imminent need to support and not impede that 
spirit of scientific exploration in our own era.

Here are some links to video clips about early television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOvabJFNpxs&feature=related 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOvabJFNpxs&feature=related>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKM4MNrB25o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzFz2Nrq6s&feature=related 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzFz2Nrq6s&feature=related>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A7MN4TjC2Q&feature=related 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A7MN4TjC2Q&feature=related>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6O_I9l1kok&feature=related 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6O_I9l1kok&feature=related>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShO_woNh1dE&feature=watch_response 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShO_woNh1dE&feature=watch_response>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb_EXSIfHjA  (Part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnu9jvgrq58&NR=1 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnu9jvgrq58&NR=1>  (Part 2)