An Idaho farm teenager sketched electronic television on his chemistry teacher's blackboard
At Rigby High School in Idaho, Philo Farnsworth filled several blackboards explaining to his teacher how pictures could be scanned entirely by electrons, with no spinning discs. Years later, a drawing recalled from that lesson helped him beat the Radio Corporation of America in a patent fight over who invented television.
Farnsworth was born on 19 August 1906 in a log cabin near Beaver, Utah, eldest of five in a Latter-day Saint family. In 1918 they moved to a ranch near Rigby with a Delco generator, which the boy learned to fix. He rewound a discarded motor to electrify his mother's hand-cranked washing machine and won $25 from a pulp magazine for a magnetic car lock. His father died in January 1924, leaving Philo to support the family.
He scored second highest in the country on the Naval Academy's entry tests, then left within months on learning that the government would own any patents he produced in service. At Brigham Young University he sat in on advanced science classes he had been barred from. In Salt Lake City two San Francisco fundraisers, Leslie Gorrell and George Everson, gave him $6,000 to start a lab. He married Elma 'Pem' Gardner in May 1926.
Existing television relied on Nipkow discs, spinning plates punched with spiral holes. Farnsworth's image dissector tube did the scanning electronically, and on 7 September 1927 it transmitted one straight line to a receiving set elsewhere in his lab at 202 Green Street, San Francisco. For his impatient backers' press demonstration in 1928 he broadcast a dollar sign. In 1929 he transmitted live people, including a small image of Pem with her eyes shut against the glaring lights.
David Sarnoff of RCA offered $100,000 for his patents plus a job in 1931; Farnsworth refused. RCA then claimed Vladimir Zworykin's 1923 patent came first, but in 1934 the Patent Office gave Farnsworth priority, and Sarnoff eventually paid royalties. His cameras helped televise the 1936 Berlin Olympics. His Fort Wayne company sold complete sets from 1938 to 1951. Later he built the Farnsworth Fusor, a small fusion device that yields neutrons but not usable power. He held 300 patents and died in 1971.
Source: Philo Farnsworth
