Stuff You Missed in History ClassToday we're revisiting the life of Phylo T. Farnsworth, often called the "Father of Television." His initial idea for electronic television came to him as a teen. He's also become something of an icon representing the little guy -- he battled big business in in a patent suit.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Hey everybody, and Happy Saturday. Today we are returning to the story of Philo T. Farnsworth, who first appeared on our show on September. He is known as the father of television and that invention led to a decade long patent battle. If you like this kind of history, our network also has a brand new show that's all about inventors and entrepreneurs. It's The Brink with Aerial Casting and Jonathan Strickland. Every week they explore the story of people who took big steps in the world of business without knowing exactly where they were going to land on the other side. So stay tuned at the end of this episode for the trailer to The Brink. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and we've had some Scientists episodes lately and we're going to have another YEP. If any of our listeners watch Futurama, you will recognize the name Farnsworth, But unless you listen to the creator's commentary tracks on the show's DVD releases, or you are a fan of television history, you might not know that the crotchety mad scientist on the show is actually named for a real scientists of the twentieth century who was a Utah farm boy that actually kind of changed the way humans see the world. You know, who might recognize the name and the connection. People who watch Warehouse their teen Oh, yeah, which I don't watch. I have that point. They have these Farnsworth devices that are totally based on this technology, and there is even it's a little old at this point's got some age on it hasn't been updated in a while. Free iOS app that makes sure iPhone into a Farnsworth device. Interesting, And the scientists we're talking about today is Filo T. Farnsworth, and he was interested in science almost from birth. He was inventing things as early as grade school. But his real claim to fame in terms of technology is uh in television. He also has become something of an icon representing the little guy because he went up against a big business in a patent lawsuit and kind of a David versus Goliath situation. Yeah, which ends both happily and sadly. Yeah, it does. It doesn't have quite as satisfying and ending as the David and Goliath story. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little later. We will. He's a fascinating, fascinating man and so insightful at such an early age that it kind of blows my mind. Uh. And I also feel compelled to mention right out of the gate that a lot of the history with him is all based on verbal accounts that various people have given. So there's some variation, like sometimes even his age will change, you know, in two different versions of the story, even though they're close and will account for most of those. But it would really becombersome to be like, well, this person said he was you know, it was this year. This person said it was this year. If they're close, I don't always like break out and go. No, this was two different accounts that they they were assume there might be some age range changes by you know, we're dealing with an oral account, all oral history, coming from multiple people for much of the earlier part. So he was born, we know, in Utah in August of nineteen o six. He was born in August nineteen His name was Philo Taylor Farnsworth, and Uh. He was born in a log cabin that was actually built by his grandfather, who was a Mormon pioneer, So he was part of a Utah family that had really come over with the Mormon tradition as they came to kind of settle the area. When he was twelve, the family moved to Franklin, Idaho, and his first sort of scientific triumph happened when he was thirteen. He entered at a National science contest which was sponsored by Science and Invention magazine, and he won it. And his idea was a tamper proof lock for a Model T ignition switch. Apparently at the time there really wasn't like a way to lock a Model T. All the keys were basically the same for the ignition from car to car to car, so he had figured out a way to make one key for one car. Somehow the idea of of a Model T theft ring brought on by non secure ignitions, which is it's really funny to me. During high school, he converted all of his family's home appliances to electric power, which is pretty impressive considering that they had not had electricity in their home until he was fourteen. Yeah, and he allegedly learned all of this. Uh. The sort of apocryphal story is that he found electrical manuals and like technical diagrams in the house that they had moved did into at some point that the previous owner had left behind, and he just studied those and learned how electricals worked. As a kid, you know, I can see an adult doing that, like having kind of the focus of mine to like break it down. That's what happens on Orange is the New Black? Is this what happens? Uh? And then when he was uh sixteen or thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, depending on who you talked to. Uh. Some accounts say it was ninety one. There's actually a television appearance that Farnsworth made where he says it's ninety two, but we know it's right around fifteen or sixteen. Uh. He sketched out a concept for a vacuum tube and he showed it to his high school chemistry chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, and Farnsworth had detailed this idea that by controlling the speed and direction of electrons, he could turn electricity into pictures using the vacuum tube. So the idea was that the tube would shoot electrons toward a screen and project an image. And this was all the radical he hadn't, of course, been able to test any of this. He was just thinking through how he thought it would work. He had kind of made it up in his head and drawn it. Yeah, And according to legend, he got the idea from the parallel plowing rows on the family farm, thinking that an electron beam could do a similar line by line scan of an image. And there are different accounts of whether that was a field of potatoes or beats, but we know it was a field with straight lines was being plowed on the farm. So, as the story goes, his teacher did not quite get what he was talking about, and his fellow students didn't either. I'm imagining the teacher kind of patting him on the head and going, that's nice, dear, well you say, except he was fifteen. Well, and Tolman hung onto that sketch. Yeah, there was something about it that he thought like, this is interesting enough that I'm going to keep it. Maybe this is a real thing and not space magic. Yeah. So after high school, Farnsworth attended Brigham Young University, starting in but unfortunately his education hit an early roadblock when his father died in nineteen twenty four. He had to drop out of school so that he could help work and support the family. And this really put an end to his formal education, but his scientific work didn't stop there. He kept learning on his own, tankering and experimenting. One of the many self taught people that we've talked about in the podcast. Yeah, we do. A lot of our big names in the science history and invention are really self taught, which I think is an interesting through line. And in Filo married Elma pim Gardner and they would eventually have four children together. We won't go into depth on their kids, but I wanted to make a note that same year he was able to get enough cash together to move into full time research. He had been working for two professional fundraisers. They were George Everson and Leslie Garrell in southern California and their bulk mailing business. After Farnsworth told his bosses about his concept for an electronic television, the pair formed this venture partnership with him as Everson, Farnsworth and Garrel. Additional investment came from the Cracker Bank under President William W. Crocker, and a new group, Crocker Research Laboratories, was formed. Crocker and yet another investor, Roy and Bishop were based in San Francisco, and consequently they wanted Farnsworth to move closer to where they were, So with all of this funding in place, Farnsworth set up a lab at two O two Green Street, which is at the bottom of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, with his wife Pim and her brother Cliff Gardner as his assistants. In nineven. In January, Farnsworth filed for his first patents for his television system, and later that year, on September seven, he unveiled his electronic television prototype, and it was the first of its kind. It featured a video EEO camera tube, which he also called an image dissector. It was essentially the same thing he had sketched as a teenager and shown to his slightly befottled chemistry teacher. Yeah, that's going to be important lead as well. The first image that he transmitted was really just a blurry line. But working with his research team, because he hired more people on and they were dubbed the Lab Gang, he was able to pretty quickly advance the technology and he was sending progressively more complex shapes, and within a few years he actually sent signals to a location that was eight blocks away at the Merchant's Exchange building. During all of this time of really rapid development, they actually had an enormous setback in late ninety eight. The lab and its assortment of chemicals and electrical components caught fire and they had to completely rebuild it from scratch. So basically they'd been rolling along and they had to start completely over and completely rebuild. So thank how much faster it would have gone if they hadn't had this big chunk of time where they had starting completely over. Yeah. On September three, which is just a little before that fire happened, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about Farnsworth Television, and the article described how farnsworth All electronic approach was a total game changer, so to quote. All television systems now in use employ a revolving disc two feet in diameter to break up or scan the image. A similar disc is at the receiving end, and the two discs must revolve at precisely the same instant and at precisely the same speed, or blurred vision results. Farnsworth system employs no moving parts whatsoever. Instead of moving the machine, he buries the electric current that plays over the image and thus gets the necessary scanning. The system is thus simple in the extreme, and one of the major mechanical obstacles to the perfection of television is thereby removed. This article is actually pretty detailed. Engines the frame rate, which is twenty pictures per second and the resolution, which is eight thousand elements or pinpoints of light for each picture. The screen he was using to demonstrate in was a mirror one point to five inches square. It is tiny. As we mentioned earlier, the warehouse their teen viewers have a sense of what that looks like, and the words of the chronicle, it is a queer looking little image in bluish light, now one that frequently smudges and blurs. But the basic principle is achieved and perfection is now a matter of engineering. And at the time Farms was actually told the paper that he envisioned that his television receiver could actually be attached to a radio set, and he thought it was gonna be sold at retail for about a hundred dollars, which is a lot of money at the time. But uh, it's just interesting that he had this whole plan of how it was going to become a business so while he was just a privately funded inventor and researcher, Radio Corporation of America, also known as r c A, was a giant. You couldn't legally build a radio in the United States without an r c A license. David Sarnoff, who was the acting president of our CIA at the time, had established this business model of finding scientists and engineers, hiring them and buying out their patent rights to grow our CIA's legal holdings, and Sarnoff was really quick to protect his company's steak in the home entertainment market when he got wind of Farnsworth's new television. On November eighteenth, uh an essay that was actually written by Sarnoff appeared in the New York Times and it was entitled Forging an Electric Eye to Scan the World, and it assured readers that Farnsworth Television was nowhere near ready for the home market, and that TVs would first be available to consumers from our CIA, and that they were going to beat Farnsworths of the market. This reminds me of the competing advertisements in our episode about the history of the sewing machine. A lot of this reminds me of it. Once we get into the r C a portion of it. This is not really a real thing. Ours are real thing. A month later, another New York Times piece was published entitled Leaders Dispel Television Fears, and this one was not written by Sarnoff, but he was the main source for the article. This one encouraged readers to keep buying radios, particularly for the holidays, instead of waiting for television. Sarnoff even hired another inventor, Vladimir's working from the research team at Westinghouse, to do a little bit of digging for him. He was, on paper hired to head up UH some labs, but it was clear that Sarnoff also wanted him to kind of try to figure out what the heck Farnsworth was actually up to working. Actually visited farnsworth San Francisco Lab in n and when he returned from his mission, he attempted to reverse engineer the technology he had seen while he was visiting Farnsworth. And there are some versions of this story that say that was working actually telegraphed design and Schamata information ahead to our CIA so that the lab could get to work on it. And by the time he got back from visiting Farnsworth in San Francisco. The first model was there, but those seemed to be a little bit tall talish. That's a that would be a very quick build of things for people that did not have the first hand account of it for three D printers. So, before you ask why in the world would Farnsworth let a competitor just come visit his lab, pretty sure that he did not know that that's what's working was. Yeah, there are accounts at the time to indicate that he thought it's working was still under the Westinghouse umbrella, and Westinghouse shown some interest in Farnsworth's work, and so the financial backers of the Green Street Lab had been encouraging Farnsworth to sell his idea to Westinghouse or at least licensed the rights to them. So I remember this was all going on right after the stock market crash, and while Farnsworth was an idealist then wanted to tanker and not think a whole lot about money. The people who were paying for his work, we're pretty financially nervous at this point. Yeah, and some accounts will say that it was clear that his working was still working for our c A and not Westinghouse. Um, but really the crux of the matter was that Farnsworth thought this was like a Oh, I'm gonna come and visit and hang out and see what licensing options we might be able to work out. Not and I'm coming to steal all of your ideas and technology. Trip. So but when it's Workin's attempts to recreate farnsworth device didn't work out. They completely fell flat. He wasn't able to deliver. Sarnoff actually decided that he was going to go visit Green Street himself, and he did so in spring of nine one. And there's some hint that he kind of thought he was the big businessman that was going to go in strong arm this foolish farm boy. Uh. But Farnsworth actually wasn't there at the lab when Sarnov dropped in unannounced, but he was allowed to enter um staff let him in, and he eventually, after looking around and returning back to r C headquarters, he made an offer to hire Farnsworth into the r C A family and to buy Farnsworth's company and his patents. What he made was a pretty low ball offer, and Farnsworth said no. And this did not go over well at all. Yeah, and it really was low ball. Even the investors that have been kind of urging Farnsworth to look into selling because of the volatility of the stock market and the economy at the time, even they were like, that doesn't sound like a fair offered us um. So, as with most game changing inventions that also uh involved corporate intrigue and bruised egos, a legal battle ensued, backed by our c A's huge legal power. Vladimir's working claimed that Farnsworth's work violated patents he already had on a similar invention, and in three Zorkian had applied for a patent for an invention called an iconoscope, which was an electronic image scanner. So there were similarities, and this was the basis for a decade long war that our ci A morged waged against Farnsworth. Although it's of note that's work hean never was able to build a functioning model of his patent at all. He it was all theoretical. He never was able to make a real world version of it. You're right, this is just like really really similar. It's worth noting that other inventors were also on the trail of televised imagery. Charles Jenkins came up with a scanning drum to display moving silhouettes. Ino and John Bard Scotland had made mechanical image transmissions using a transparent rod array in in dr Herbert Ives came up with a wire harness system for Bell Labs that sent electrical impulses to electrodes on its viewing screen. Individually, there were televisions being developed in France, Great Britain and Russia by a number of different researchers. Yeah, so again it really is similar to the sewing machine thing or everybody knew this was kind of the next step, and they were all kind of working towards creating it, but some different approaches. But even with all of this work, and as was mentioned in the newspaper article about him, like they talked about existing televisions too, So all of this work was going on. Uh and Zworkin's patent had happened before farms or TV, but he was the first one to actually produce an electronic TV based on his research and designs. So now is when we bring back that high school chemistry teacher. Yeah, so the one that kept filers drawing. This turned out to be really important when it came to all the legal proceedings because he was able to testify that Farnsworth had diagrammed and described this television idea way back in the drawing itself, which he had hung onto. Was also a huge moon to Farnsworth's case, and while the case was dragging on, Farnsworth was still working in one he started the Philco Radio Corporation's television department. In an exchange for additional lab funding for his own research, Farnsworth had to move his family and his team to Philadelphia. That move was not really popular with his wife, Pam. She really loved San Francisco and she often spoke uh when you know, asked about their lives or giving interviews about how you know, the West was really where their heart was. But in nineteen thirty three, so just a couple of years later, Farnsworth left Philco and continued his work so low because phil COO had decided that the television division did not really fit in their corporate vision any longer. So after moving his entire family kind of against their will, it turned out that wasn't going to work out so well. So irritating five, the U S. Patent Office found in Farnsworth's favor, our C A appealed, but that same verdict came down again and again. As you can imagine, there's some uh bruised e goes at play even after you know this element of the legal proceedings was done. Uh. And in y eight Farnsworth founded the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation. He was really ready to launch into the brave new world of consumer television and broadcast reception. But as an independent inventor, which was just a creature that was basically extinct in this environment of explosive growth of corporate labs in the thirties and forties, Farnsworth couldn't really stand up to the pr machine that r c A was able to crank out. At the World's Fair, r c A sponsored a television pavilion and Sarnoff brokered a deal for the radio and television rights to air the opening ceremony. But I feel like we should mention prior to being named acting president of our CIA, Sarnov had actually founded NBC Radio Network, which was owned by our ci A. So it kind of sets the stage of like broadcast rights and bitter battles really being at the heart of network television. Basically from day one, it was already about who had the rights to do what and kind of some you know, backbiting and really aggressive business practices. So our c A had been working on television technology throughout these whole legal proceedings, and it was selling televisions and department stores leading up to this event, and it announced just prior to the fair opening that NBC was starting a regular broadcast schedule. And at this point Farnsworth realized he was outgunned. I think I read a um A statistic that right out of the gate r c A had an easy or greater market share, and there was just no way that Farnsworth was going to be able to keep up. So he actually sold our ci A a non exclusive license at that point for one million dollars. After the r c A deal, Farnsworth was really exhausted and he had a nervous breakdown that resulted in him being hospitalized. He really struggled with depression and would continue to struggle with it for the rest of his life. And meanwhile, World War two put television in a time out because all manufacture of non military electronics was banned by the U. S Government for the duration of the war. When the war ended. The Farnsworth Corporation was making its home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and it started to produce television sets. But our Cia had the resources to launch a much more successful manufacturing operation. Farnsworth just couldn't keep his company afloat. It was eventually purchased by International Telephone and Telegraph Company, and under I T and T, Farnsworth continued his research into television as well as nuclear fusion. The television division was shut down before very long, though, Yeah, so had uh. At that point, Farnsworth's work in television had basically been shut out a little bit by big business. You know. He had battled our Cia, and while he tried to still kind of struggle with a little small part of the market, it wasn't going to work out. And so when he sold his company, thinking he was going to bolster his his television work, they were like, no, we don't really want to be in the TV business after all. So, uh, he was, you know, shut out of television at that point, but he kept on inventing, and he certainly kept on studying science. In nineteen fifty one, he was awarded an honor a Doctorate of Science by the Indiana Institute of Technology, Yeah, which was his first degree since he did not ever finish college. UH. In nineteen fifty seven he started the Farnsworth Research Corporation as its president and director of Research. In nineteen sixty seven, he moved back to Utah and became head of a fusion lab at Brigham Young University, and just a year later that lab actually changed names to FILO. T. Farnsworth and Associates and it moved to Salt Lake City. But within two years funds had dried up for the lab. In nineteen sixty eight, he was awarded his second honorary doctorate, this time from Brigham Young University, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Nineteen seventy really marked the beginning of the end for Farnsworth UH. As we mentioned, the lab was running out of money and he was forced to close it due to the lack of funds, and at that point the depression that he had really been battling for decades, you know, it had really started in the UH in the thirties, going through all of that battling with our ci A and patent suits and then having to deal with the war offsetting their efforts. The depression just kind of one out at that point, and he started drinking and drinking heavily, and it really became a habitual drinking problem in the last few months of his life. He died of pneumonia on March eleventh, nine seventy one, in Salt Lake City. When he died, the televisions that were being made for consumer markets used components that were included in about a hundred of his patents, although he really didn't have any wealth to speak of. On the other hand, Sarnoff died the same year, but very wealthy, extremely wealthy. Uh so, well, what I have to say about that he didn't get to take it with him, that's true. Uh yeah, I mean it is kind of one of those things where Farnsworth in so many ways was in the right, but it really did him no good. Even though he won the patent lawsuit, and even though he made that big settlement with our c A, that money went towards funding a lab that was really struggling and didn't didn't turn out so well in terms of um his his end of life quality. But after his passing, his wife Pim really worked tirelessly to try to establish her husband's image in a positive way and ensure that he was recognized as the visionary that he really was. And Farnsworth really gave Pim a great deal of credit throughout his life for his most famous work, and he would often say that my wife and I started television and they had worked together. Pam had worked alongside her husband throughout his life in his various labs, and as he often became really engaged with his work, he would forget to eat, he would neglect to think about his health. He apparently had this weird habit where he was in insomniac so at night he would go to bed and kind of give himself a problem to solve, knowing that he would wake up and hoping that he would be working through it in that sort of half sleep state. Like he really kind of was not doing things that were great in terms of like his quality of health as he went on. Uh. But Pam was always the constant that kind of kept their lives in order despite his sort of odd behaviors and his tendency to get really over absorbed into his work. In Night one, his two oh two Green Street address in San Francisco, which was home to the lab where the first televised image was projected, was given a historical marker. There's also a memorial statue of Farnsworth at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco. In the state of Utah gave the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, d C. A statue of Farnsworth by artist James r Avadi which had the inscription father of Television. Yeah, I love uh inn. He was inducted into the San Francisco Hall of Fame, and in he was inducted into the Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. And in his life he had held at least a hundred sixty patents, and he contributed to the development of many other things which we are actually relevant to, uh you know, other recent podcasts we've been working on. He worked. Some of his work contributed to the development of radar, infra red electron microscopes, baby incubators. UH So when you go to like the I c U or the Newborn i CEU, the nick you those incubators are in part due to the work that Farnsworth did, and even astronomical telescopes. And Pim died in two thousand and six, but their kids have continued this tradition of kind of keeping his image alive, and well, uh, there was also uh. In two thousand four, they announced a screenplay. New Line Cinema had optioned the screenplay from Aaron Sorkin about the life of Farnsworth, which never came to fruition, and in two thousand five Sorkin adapted it to the stage. And it's been produced a couple of times, and may be will eventually go full circle and become a film again. But if it ever does, I feel like I should pre warn people that it's it's not historically accurate, like that was not the intent. We changed for dramatic effect. Is there a musical? I feel like there's a musical. I hope not. There might be, I have I'm not. We're in the opposite. You're like, I hope not because singing, and I'm like, I hope so because the singing. Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals. There's nothing wrong with them. It's my personal I don't like to watch people sing. They don't like to look in their mouths thing. I know. That's my weird neurotic biz. I want fabulousness about filo Farnsworth with a big chorus line and lots of kicking doesn't seem right for him though. He just wanted to quietly work in the lab. Why that's why people can all do the kicking and the big boisterous show numbers, whereas he could have quiet little songs in his lab. But yeah, that's Farnsworth. It's interesting because in some sort when you say bi loot of Farnsworth, people go, oh, I love his story, and other people just get a glazy look like he's he's kind of reached through history and hit certain people, and a lot of people have become very interested in his story, but for many others, they have no idea he even existed, let alone lead to the box that uh inhabits our lives all the time, although modern day TV tech is very different. But I'm hoping that all the Warehouse thirteen fans who've been writing us and asking us to talk about Paracelsis can take some temporary solace in this episode about Farnsworth. I love him. I have a real soft spot for him, partially because I love television and entertainment, and partially because you know, he's just that guy who wants to work on projects and didn't really have business acumen and just was a great thinker that kind of was an underdog. Love him. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. Hi, I'm Aerial Casting and I'm Jonathan Strickland, and together we're going to tell you the stories behind some of the biggest triumphs and failures in business. That's right. We're going to explore situations that tested the metal of entrepreneurs, pivotal moments that required making tough decisions, some that led to huge success, like when Apple brought Steve Jobs back into the full and others that ended in failure, such as when a company with not one, but three of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in history went out of business. We'll be talking about some big companies that everybody knows, like Disney, Lego, and Harley Davidson, and we'll cover some that might not be quite such a household name, like the Rocky Mountain Candy Company. Will learn about the different challenges these companies have faced, from difficult startups to keeping a global, multibillion dollar company under control. We'll see how sometimes the problems faced by a small company and those by a huge one aren't that different from each other, and we want to know more than just facts and figures. We'll talk about the human element behind it all, and together we try to answer the question, what do you do when you find yourself at the brink? Subscribe to the Brink and find out with a new episode each week. Two
