This Week in History: The genius of Philo Farnsworth
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
It is the unfortunate reality of the universe that life is not fair.
The world has no obligation to make our stay on it any better or worse than where our own actions take us.
For some people, life is a terrible thing to happen to them. For others, who learn to bend with the pressures of life rather than break, it holds limitless possibilities.
Take, by way of example, the little-known inventor Philo Farnsworth.
Philo was born in a log cabin in Indian Creek, Utah, in 1906. Stories tell us that from the time he could talk, he was asking questions about gadgets.
At 11, the boy and his family loaded up several wagons and made the long journey to Idaho, where they hoped to set up a new life.
On the way north, they stopped in Salt Lake City, where the electric street lights, cars and telephone wires set the young inquisitive boy agog with wonder.
The Farnsworths stayed a few years at an uncle's farm, which had electricity for light, heat and equipment.
It was while living here that Philo discovered his passion for tinkering and he routinely fixed the old generator and mechanical farm equipment on the farm.
His bedroom in the attic was full of science magazines, his favorite being Hugo Gernsback's “Science and Invention.”
He avidly followed the results of the magazine’s ongoing competition whereby readers from throughout the country submitted their inventions for consideration.
The magazine editors awarded prizes to the most spectacular inventions devised by their readership.
When he was 15 years old, his family moved out of his uncle’s house and onto their very own farm.
Shortly thereafter, Philo won Gernsback's first prize of $25 for best reader invention – he had built a magnetic car clock.
When he came of age, Philo attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where his family had recently moved. Unfortunately, when his father died suddenly a few years later, Philo dropped out of university to care for his now struggling family.
But that didn’t stop him from tinkering, and not long after dropping out of college, Philo attracted the attention of two investors.
With funding from these men, Philo moved with his new wife to a laboratory in San Francisco. It would be here that he would create his greatest invention to date.
For years, the young man had been kicking around the idea of transmitting images across space electronically.
The notion itself was nothing new and, in fact, other inventors throughout the world were struggling to develop just such a device – most notably, the Russian-born inventor Vladimir Zworykin at Westinghouse Electric Corp. in Pittsburgh.
The race was on to develop the world’s first feasible television set.
On Sept. 7, 1927, in his small laboratory in San Francisco, Philo placed a slide containing an image of a triangle in front of a machine he called an Image Dissector.
Retreating to a back room, Philo gathered around a receiving tube and pressed the button to commence the experiment. As he watched, one line of the triangle appeared in a small bluish square of light on the receiver – he had done it, he had invented television.
If he thought fortune and fame would soon be his, Philo was sorely mistaken. The age of the idealist-inventor-turned-businessman was past. It was up to capitalists, not the inventor, to fully harness the possibilities of new inventions.
That, at least, is how David Sarnoff saw things. Sarnoff was the president of Radio Corporation of America, more commonly known as RCA, the biggest radio company in the nation.
When news reached him of this Philo Farnsworth and his unbelievable device, Sarnoff knew he had to control it. So, the businessman sent along Vladimir Zworykin, the Russian inventor who now worked for RCA.
Zworykin approached his fellow inventor with RCA’s offer of $100,000 for the rights of the television – an amount of money equivalent to roughly $1.5 million today. But this Utahan farm-boy had more guile in him that Sarnoff had supposed, and he obstinately refused to sell his brainchild for so cheap a price.
So Sarnoff resorted to the favorite weapon of all capitalists – the courts. Suing Philo for supposed copyright infringement, Sarnoff hoped to bog down the inventor in a sea of lawyer bills and complicated legal briefs. Philo was equally determined, however, and he travelled to Europe to drum up investors and when he returned to America, he gave Sarnoff the fight of his life.
After nearly a decade of court battles, Sarnoff recognized that his profit margins were quickly dissipating. In 1939, he caved and offered Philo Farnsworth a $1 million, multi-year licensing agreement for his device.
Sticking to his guns had allowed Philo to holdout and instead of a one-time payment of $100,000, he received what in today’s equivalent would be $16.8 million for licensing alone.
Despite his achievements, Philo Farnsworth never received the acclaim he so deserved. In 1957, he was a mystery guest on the 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 the television.”
Philo’s prize for stumping the panel was $80 and a carton of cigarettes.
No, life isn’t fair – even for those, like Philo, who fight for the just purpose of receiving due rewards.
But, we can take heart in the story of Philo Farnsworth. He, at least, was able to assuage the injuries done to him by impartial Fate with $16.8 million.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.