by Bryson, Bill
In 1927, the question of how freely the state could exercise the power of sterilization came to a head in a legal case known as Buck v. Bell. The case focused on a seventeen-year-old girl in Virginia named Carrie Buck, who was deemed to be of low intelligence and had recently given birth to an illegitimate child, in consequence of which she was now confined in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded at Lynchburg. Her mother was already an inmate there. In 1924, Carrie Buck was selected for sterilization by the colony’s superintendent, Dr. John H. Bell (hence Buck v. Bell).
The chief contention was that not only was Carrie Buck mentally incompetent, but so were her mother and daughter—three straight generations of defectives. The family, it was argued, was clearly incapable of producing other than mental defectives and ought to be sterilized for its own good and the good of society. The evidence against the family was hardly overwhelming. Laughlin, the state’s chief witness, pronounced against the Bucks without ever having met or examined any of them. He declared that Carrie Buck came from a “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class” of southerner and should be rendered incapable of producing more of her kind on grounds of class alone.
The charge of simplemindedness against Vivian Buck, Carrie’s daughter, was made purely on the word of a social worker who examined the child once and thought there was something “not quite normal” about her, but she freely added: “I should say that perhaps my knowledge of the mother may prejudice me in that regard.” The child was just six months old at the time; no tests then existed for determining the mental capabilities of such a young person. In fact, Vivian was later shown to have normal, possibly even above-average, intelligence. She died of an intestinal disorder at just eight years old, but her performance at school to that point was entirely capable, and once she even made the honor roll. Carrie Buck herself was clearly not retarded in any meaningful sense, if at all. She read newspapers every day and enjoyed the new craze for crossword puzzles. An academic who later interviewed Buck described her as “not a sophisticated woman [but] neither mentally ill nor retarded.”
Nonetheless, when given the new Stanford version of the Binet-Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test (and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid), Carrie Buck was determined to have a mental age of nine while her mother didn’t quite make it to eight. Officially, they both fell into the classification of “moron.”
The case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. The court ruled by a vote of 8 to 1 that Buck should be sterilized. The majority opinion was written by eighty-six-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—a man of such long life that he had fought as an infantryman in the Civil War.
Holmes summarized the situation concisely: “Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.” He agreed with Laughlin that sterilization was necessary in society “to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” Then he gave his solution: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
Then came the ringing conclusion that has been quoted ever since: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Only one justice, Pierce Butler, dissented from the majority view, and he did not offer a written opinion to explain his dissent. Holmes was supported by all the other justices, who included the chief justice and former U.S. president, William Howard Taft, and the liberal Louis D. Brandeis.
Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention. The New York Times gave it a small mention on page 19. The News Leader of Richmond, Virginia, where the matter was a local story, didn’t report it at all.
Slowly sentiment began to turn against negative eugenics. Many serious geneticists, like Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia University, would have nothing to do with it, and in the summer of 1927 Harvard quietly declined a gift to endow the university with a chair in negative eugenics.
Harry H. Laughlin, however, seemed unstoppable. He became increasingly—and in retrospect very oddly—hostile to epileptics, insisting that they must be either sterilized or by some means confined during their reproductive years. The oddity in this is that it is now known that Laughlin was secretly an epileptic himself. He sometimes had seizures at Cold Spring Harbor, which his colleagues overlooked or covered up even as they were condemning sufferers elsewhere.
In the 1930s, Laughlin sowed the seeds of his downfall as he began to establish warm relationships with Germany’s newly emergent Nazis, some of whom came to Cold Spring Harbor to study American methods and findings. In 1936, the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his commitment to race purification. The following year Laughlin and Cold Spring Harbor became U.S. distributors of a Nazi documentary called The Hereditarily Diseased, which argued that it was foolishly sentimental to keep retarded people alive.
This was more than many people could countenance. At a convention of the American Jewish Congress in New York, the keynote speaker, Bernard S. Deutsch, attacked Laughlin in the bitterest terms. “Dr. Laughlin’s ‘purification of race’ theory is as dangerous and as spurious as the purified Aryan race theories advanced by the Nazis, to which it bears suspicious resemblance,” Deutsch said. The Carnegie Institution, the Eugenics Record Office’s chief source of funding, appointed Herbert Spencer Jennings, a respected geneticist from Johns Hopkins University, to review Laughlin’s work. Spencer found that Laughlin had falsified data, manipulated findings to support racist conclusions, and generally perpetrated scientific fraud for over a quarter of a century. Laughlin was forced to step down from the ERO, which was effectively closed in 1938. Laughlin retired to Missouri, but a huge amount of damage had been done.
Altogether at least sixty thousand people were sterilized because of Laughlin’s efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.
In late September 1927, Carrie Buck, her legal options exhausted, was scheduled for sterilization and the procedure was carried out the following month. Her sister was sterilized as well, but without knowing what was happening. She was told she was being treated for appendicitis.
27
In the spring of 1927, just before the Snyder-Gray trial consumed the world’s attention, an arresting story appeared as the second lead on page 1 of the New York Times. As an indication of its significance, the Times gave it seven stacks of headlines:
FAR-OFF SPEAKERS SEEN
as WELL as HEARD HERE
iN A TEST OF TELEVISION
LIKE A PHOTO COME TO LIFE
HOOVER’S FACE PLAINLY
IMAGED AS HE SPEAKS
IN WASHINGTON
THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY
PICTURES ARE FLASHED BY WIRE
AND RADIO SYNCHRONIZING
WITH SPEAKER’S VOICE
COMMERCIAL USE IN DOUBT
BUT AT&T HEAD SEES A NEW
STEP IN CONQUEST OF NATURE
AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH
The accompanying report described how reporters and officials at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Labs on Bethune Street in Manhattan had watched in astonishment as a live image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in Washington materialized before them on a glass screen about the size of a modern Post-it note.
“More than 200 miles of space intervening between the speaker and his audience was annihilated,” marveled the anonymous reporter. Li
steners could even hear Hoover’s speech. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance,” the commerce secretary intoned with gravity and pomp.
“As each syllable was heard, the motion of the speaker’s lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen in the demonstration room,” explained the Times man. “It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that.”
Mr. Hoover was then succeeded by a comedian named A. Dolan, who first told some stories in an Irish brogue, then quickly changed into blackface and returned with “a new line of quips in negro dialect.” This, too, was deemed visually excellent.
It appears, however, that the reporter may have been carried away by the emotion of the moment, because the AT&T equipment was not capable of projecting really clear images. Realizing this, AT&T abandoned all attempts to conquer television soon afterward, and left the field open to others, of whom there were many.
As a theoretical notion, television had been around for some time. As far back as 1880, a French engineer named Maurice Leblanc saw that images could be sent a bit at a time because the eye retains an image for about a tenth of a second and thus can be fooled into seeing intermittent images as whole ones. It’s why we see movies as a continuous show rather than as thousands of individual frames. That considerably simplified the challenge of transmission.
Four years later, a Russian named Paul Nipkow invented a system using a spinning disc to scan images onto a sensor through holes placed at calculated intervals around the disc. It was a tricky proposition, and Nipkow failed to make it work, but his disc became the standard on which nearly all subsequent attempts at creating television were based. The word television itself was coined by the Russian Constantin Perskyi, for the Paris Exhibition in 1900, though many other names were used for various devices in the early days—iconoscope, radiovisor, electric eye, even electric telescope.
By the 1920s, four parties were thought to be close to breakthrough: teams at Bell Laboratories and General Electric in the United States and the individuals Charles Francis Jenkins in Baltimore and John Logie Baird in Britain.
For all the effort and anticipation, no one knew quite what television would be good for. The general assumption was that the applications would mostly be practical. Scientific American, in an article titled “Motion Pictures by Radio,” foresaw television as a crime prevention device. “A criminal suspect might appear simultaneously in a thousand police headquarters for identification,” it supposed. AT&T saw it not as an entertainment medium, but as a way of allowing people on telephones to see each other.
Only Charles Francis Jenkins saw clearly what TV could offer. “The new machine will come to the fireside … with photoplays, the opera and a direct vision of world activities,” he predicted. Though forgotten now—he doesn’t even have an entry in the American Dictionary of National Biography—Jenkins was an accomplished inventor. He owned over four hundred patents, several of them for successful products, some of which we use yet. If you have ever had a drink from a conical paper cup, you have used a Jenkins product. But one invention that was never going to work was his radiovisor, as he called it. Even if he got it working, which he did not, it could only ever transmit forty-eight lines of image, not enough to show objects as anything other than shadowy blurs. It would be like trying to identify objects through frosted glass.
But this was the deliriously upbeat 1920s, and although Jenkins did not have a product to sell, or anything more than a vague (and ultimately unrealizable) hope that his system could be developed into something commercially appealing one day, he formed a corporation that was soon valued at more than $10 million.
Much the same sort of inflated optimism attended the efforts of John Logie Baird, a Scotsman based in London. From an attic flat in Soho, Baird created a stream of mostly useless inventions, including inflatable shoes and a safety razor made of glass (so it wouldn’t rust). His private life was equally unorthodox in that he and another man shared the affections of a woman who had once been Baird’s girlfriend, was now the second man’s wife, and who found it impossible to choose between the two. In true British fashion, the arrangement to share was agreed between all three over a cup of tea.
As an inventor Baird was inspired and indefatigable, but always painfully short of funds. Most of his working models were assembled from salvaged oddments and other scraps. His first Nipkow disc was the lid of a ladies’ hatbox. His lenses were made from bicycle headlights. Wondering if he might get a better resolution of his images if he shone them through a real human eye, he called at the Charing Cross Ophthalmic Hospital and asked if they had any eyes they could spare. A doctor, thinking him a qualified anatomist, gave him one. Baird took the eye home on the bus but discovered that the optic nerve was useless without a blood supply, and anyway when he clamped the eyeball into his contraption he made such a gruesome mess of it that it made him ill. He put it all in the trash can.
Still, he persevered, and in his lab in 1925, Baird managed to transmit the world’s first recognizable image of a human face. Baird was an accomplished publicist—one of his stunts was to place a working TV in a window of Selfridge’s department store, drawing crowds great enough to stop traffic—and that brought a rush of financing. By 1927, Baird was at the head of a company that had nearly two hundred employees. He was not a good company man and hated having to answer to a board of directors. Developing a particular dislike for Sir Edward Manville, the pompous chairman imposed on him by his principal investors, Baird had a lab built with an intentionally narrow entrance. The portly Manville, on his first visit, got stuck and had to be pushed through from behind. As Baird recalled proudly, Manville “lost several buttons from his waistcoat and dropped his cigar and tramped on it in the process”—and never visited the lab again.
The inescapable shortcoming of a Nipkow system, as Baird found to his unending frustration, was that it required a pair of large, noisily whirring discs—one to send and one to receive a signal—and could produce at best only a small image. A four-inch-square picture would require spinning discs six feet across—not something that many people would want in their living rooms. The discs could be dangerous, too, as a visiting scientist to Baird’s lab painfully discovered when he leaned too close and his long white beard was yanked into the workings.
The reality that Baird and all the others involved in mechanical television could never overcome was that spinning discs could simply not provide the clarity of image necessary to make television a commercial proposition. In practical terms it was impossible to produce more than about sixty lines of imagery, and the viewing screen could never be larger than about the size of a beverage coaster. Nevertheless, Baird persevered and by the summer of 1927 had about as good a working model as his system could provide.
On September 8, slightly less than five months after the Bell Labs presentation with Herbert Hoover, the New York Times reported another exciting demonstration of television, this time from England. As reporters looked on, Baird used his mechanical system to send a live image of himself more than two hundred miles, from Leeds to London. His image was clear, but it was also frustratingly small, at just two and a half inches by three; and, when magnified to a larger size through a special lens, it lost all clarity.
In fact, unbeknownst to Baird, the New York Times, and everyone else in the world at large, television had actually had its real birth one day earlier in far-off California when a young man with the resplendent name of Philo T. Farnsworth, the greatest inventor of whom most people have never heard, used cathode ray tubes and an electron beam to produce an image that genuinely had the promise to make television an enchanting reality.
Farnsworth, “the forgotten father of television,” was born in 1906 in a log cabin in Utah. His parents, pious Mormons, moved the family to a farm in Idaho not long afterward, and it was there, in the idyllic surroundings of the Snake River valley, that young Philo spent a happy childhood. He was unc
ommonly bright and devoured everything he could find on science and technology. In the summer of 1921, while plowing his father’s field, the fifteen-year-old Philo had a scientific epiphany. He had been reading Einstein’s theory on electrons and the photoelectric effect, and now it occurred to him that beams of electrons could be scanned onto a screen in a back-and-forth pattern exactly as he was plowing his father’s field, one line at a time in alternating directions. Within months he had devised a workable plan for transmitting images electronically. He made a sketch of it, which he showed to his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman. Luckily for Farnsworth, Tolman was so impressed that he kept the drawing. It would later confirm Farnsworth’s priority for the invention.
Lacking financing, Farnsworth left the idea undeveloped and instead finished high school, married his sweetheart, and enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. One day Farnsworth fell into a chance conversation with two young businessmen from San Francisco, who were so impressed with his ideas that they offered to invest $6,000—which is to say, their entire joint savings—in the project, and to help him secure a bank loan. With this, Farnsworth set up a small lab on Green Street in San Francisco. He was still just twenty years old—too young, as he discovered, to sign the contract on the loan.
Farnsworth filed his first patents for television in January 1927. Building a working television system was an almost ridiculous challenge. Parts couldn’t be bought off the shelf—most of them didn’t exist, except in Farnsworth’s fertile brain—so nearly every glowing valve and gently thrumming tube had to be designed and built from scratch. Farnsworth and a small team he assembled worked feverishly and by early September were ready to transmit the first image ever using electronic apparatus. The image was only a simple horizontal line, and Farnsworth sent it only as far as the next room, so it didn’t have the romance and awe of Baird’s or AT&T’s productions. But it did have one thing the rival inventions didn’t have: a future.