Farnsworth’s own luck changed in the spring of 1926 when two wealthy businessmen, George Everson and Leslie Gorrell, hired him as a temporary office boy. Impressed by his work ethic and intelligence, they asked Farnsworth his future plans. He entrusted them with his television idea, and after consulting with various engineers to confirm that the lad wasn’t an absolute loon, they ponied up a $6,000 investment.
The day after their May 26, 1926, wedding, Phil and Pem Farnsworth left Utah for Los Angeles, where Phil could access the California Institute of Technology’s superb research library and be close to Hollywood. From the get-go he recognized television’s entertainment potential.
Phil and Pem’s apartment doubled as home and lab. What, exactly, was going on in there baffled their fellow tenants. Farnsworth kept the curtains drawn, worked long hours, looked gaunt and mildly possessed whenever he emerged, and was constantly hauling strange coils, tubes, hoses, liquids, and glass bottles inside. Finally his neighbors came to the reasonable conclusion that the Farnsworths were bootleggers and alerted authorities, prompting a surprise visit by the LAPD. “They’re doing somethin’ kooky they call electric vision,” one officer told another after searching the premises, “but they ain’t got no still.”
Of greater concern to Farnsworth was a visit from Everson and Gorrell inquiring how their money had been spent. After forewarning them that numerous kinks needed ironing out, Farnsworth began his presentation. He connected the image dissector to the reception tube, gathered everyone in the lab around for the historic moment, and flipped on the generator. The humming machine soon began to make alarming pops and hissing noises. Acrid-smelling smoke filled the room, and Farnsworth made a dash toward the generator, but it was too late. Months of work and possibly a life’s dream sat in flames before him.
Everson and Gorrell didn’t lose hope. Although unable to contribute more capital themselves, they eventually convinced a notoriously skeptical San Francisco banker named J. J. Fagan and his colleagues to offer $25,000 for 60 percent ownership in the enterprise. Farnsworth’s elation was tempered only by the minor humiliation of needing Everson to serve as his legal guardian in the deal; Farnsworth, only twenty, wasn’t old enough to sign the partnership contract on his own.
Fagan’s investors gave Farnsworth a one-year deadline and requested he move closer to their offices, so in September 1926, Pem and Phil once more packed up their belongings and relocated to San Francisco. They rented a home to live in and a loft at 202 Green Street, where Farnsworth and his two assistants—Pem and her brother Cliff—would work.
On January 7, 1927, Farnsworth filed a patent for his electronic “Television System” to protect the idea, but he still hadn’t constructed a functioning model. With pressure mounting, he needed extra hands. He brought in his geologist cousin, Arthur Crawford, to find the perfect chemical element for the screen (cesium initially won out), followed by his sister Agnes and Pem’s sister Ruth as part-time helpers.
That September they tested the entire system—but this time just for themselves, no audience. Cliff placed a drawing of a triangle in front of the image dissector in one room while the rest of the team watched the receiving tube in another. A line appeared. Not the whole figure, but one clearly defined side. “That’s it, folks!” Farnsworth cried out. “There you have electronic television.” He repeated the show for Everson, who then wired Gorrell in Los Angeles: THE DAMNED THING WORKS.
Everson recommended to Farnsworth that, for his demonstration to Fagan and others, he produce something slightly more advanced than a single straight line. Farnsworth obliged. When the eager bankers huddled around the television screen to see what image Cliff was holding in the other room, up popped a dollar sign, eliciting bursts of laughter.
The men felt the moment had come for a press conference, but Farnsworth insisted on more time. To the investors’ dismay, the event wasn’t scheduled until Saturday, September 1, 1928, and only a handful of reporters bothered to show. Monday’s story in the San Francisco Chronicle, however, was picked up by newspapers across the country and later around the world. S.F. MAN’S INVENTION TO REVOLUTIONIZE TELEVISION, the headline proclaimed over a glowing article about the “young genius.” Farnsworth’s name was poised to become as famous as Ford, Edison, or Wright.
“Are you Farnsworth?” a policeman asked Phil the morning of October 28 while he and Pem were out playing tennis in a rare moment of relaxation. Phil said that he was.
“Well, you might want to get down to your laboratory right away,” the officer told him. “The place is on fire.”
The place was gone. What caused the blaze remains unknown, and fortunately the loft and equipment were fully insured. Farnsworth got the lab up and running again, but he lost months of time. His greater crisis was financial; just as his newly incorporated Television Laboratories was hitting its stride, Farnsworth’s backers pulled the financial plug. They wanted a major corporation to step in and offer them a return on their investment.
Meanwhile, buzz was growing around Farnsworth’s lab and a steady stream of celebrities and venerated scientists journeyed to 202 Green Street to see the wunderkind’s miracle machine. Movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. caused quite a stir when he and his Oscar-winning wife, Mary Pickford, stopped by, but Farnsworth most enjoyed kibitzing with fellow inventors such as Lee De Forest, a pioneering figure in radio, vacuum tubes, and electronics. Guglielmo Marconi also paid a visit.
Few guests expressed more interest than Vladimir Zworykin, head of Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s television research division, and Farnsworth believed that Westinghouse could be his savior. If the company agreed to a licensing arrangement, he would receive a percentage on every television camera and receiver set sold, netting him millions of dollars. Farnsworth hosted Zworykin for three days in mid-April 1930, answering every question and even inviting him to his house for dinner. Before Zworykin left San Francisco he picked up an image dissector in Farnsworth’s lab and said, “This is a beautiful instrument. I wish I had thought of it myself.” It was the highest compliment one inventor could extend to another.
No offer, however, was forthcoming. In fact, by the time Zworykin returned east, he was no longer employed by Westinghouse but had been hired by its sister corporation, RCA, at the behest of its president, David Sarnoff. Sarnoff had promised Zworykin a million-dollar budget to bring television to the masses, just as RCA had done with radio, and he had sent Zworykin to snoop on Farnsworth.
Like Zworykin, Sarnoff was a Russian-born immigrant. He spoke only his native tongue when he left Minsk (now the capital of Belarus) for New York in 1900 at the age of nine. A quick study, he soon became fluent in English, shed his accent, and sold penny newspapers to support himself, his mother, and his ailing father. At the age of fourteen he had a chance encounter with Guglielmo Marconi, who admired the boy’s pluck and made him his personal errand boy.
Years later Sarnoff was promoted, becoming a full-time wireless telegraph operator at the American Marconi Company. Along with providing Sarnoff invaluable experience working within a corporate structure, the job proved auspicious for placing Sarnoff at the center of—as he would recount throughout his life—a disaster of unprecedented magnitude.
Just before 10:30 P.M. on April 14, 1912, Sarnoff was manning American Marconi’s telegraph station atop the Wanamaker Building at Ninth Street and Broadway in New York when an urgent message beeped over the wires: “S.S. Titanic ran into iceberg. Sinking fast.” Twenty-one-year-old David Sarnoff was now the lone connection between Western civilization and the ships relaying updates about the doomed ocean liner and her 2,223 passengers. “I gave the information to the press associations and newspapers at once,” Sarnoff later said,
and it was as if bedlam had been let loose. Telephones were whirring, extras were being cried, crowds were gathering around newspaper bulletin boards.… President Taft ordered all stations in the vicinity except ours closed down so that we might have no interference in the reception of official
news.… It seemed as if the whole anxious world was attached to those phones during the seventy-two hours I crouched tense in that station. I felt my responsibility keenly, and weary though I was, could not have slept.… We began to get the names of some of those who were known to have gone down.… I passed the information on to a sorrowing world, and when messages ceased to come in, fell down like a log at my place and slept the clock around.
Terrific story. But, as it turned out, mostly false. Numerous operators worked that night (there’s some speculation that Sarnoff wasn’t even on duty), and Wanamaker was actually one of the stations temporarily shut down. Worst of all, about two weeks later, newspapers revealed that American Marconi had withheld names of the ship’s passengers to prolong the gripping account and boost its own publicity. And it worked. Even after the shameful ploy was exposed, the company’s stock and orders for their wireless services soared. (Ironically, Guglielmo Marconi himself considered traveling on the Titanic but decided to leave Europe a few days earlier and sailed instead on the British ocean liner Lusitania—the same ship that was sunk in May 1915 by a German U-boat.)
Sarnoff began his rapid climb up the corporate ladder in 1919, when he was brought on as commercial manager for the newly formed Radio Corporation of America. Within about ten years he was running the place. By then he realized that television, not just radio, was the future, and RCA its rightful progenitor.
“Up for some lunch?” Sergeant Mike calls to me from the feedlot. I’m standing out in the middle of the pasture, lost in thought.
“Sure,” I say, and walk over to his car, still thinking about how impossibly young Farnsworth was when his eureka moment struck. On our way into town, Mike and I pass several kids about Farnsworth’s age, reinforcing my incredulity that a gangly, intense teenager with very few resources had set in motion such a major revolution in technology. There’s a sense of heartbreak, too, in knowing what was in store for him.
Nothing had ever come easily to Farnsworth, but starting in the early 1930s, he and Pem were hit with a series of Job-like tragedies. They struggled, like millions in the Great Depression, to keep their noses above water. When a second wave of bank failures swept the country after the initial stock market crash, Phil and Pem were left with only $1.57 to their name. (An unexpected reimbursement check carried them awhile, but there were few other guaranteed payments on the horizon.) Then in March 1932 their eighteen-month-old son, Kenny, developed strep throat. This was the era before penicillin and other antibiotics, and only an emergency tracheotomy could stop the infection from ravaging his lungs. After the operation, the attending intern who was supposed to be watching Kenny fell asleep and didn’t see Kenny’s breathing tube begin to clog up. When a restless Farnsworth checked in on his son, he found the boy suffocating to death. Doctors rushed into the room after hearing Farnsworth call for help, but there was nothing they could do. Phil and Pem watched helplessly as baby Kenny gasped uncontrollably and then passed away right before their eyes. Farnsworth’s business partners were so anxious about his company’s financial straits that they wouldn’t let him travel to Utah to bury his son. Pem went alone. Overwhelmed with grief and stress, the couple barely spoke to each other when she returned.
David Sarnoff, meanwhile, was thriving. One by one his competitors plunged into bankruptcy, and when Sarnoff was named president of RCA in 1930, he had nearly unfettered control over an entire media empire. Three years later, RCA opened its massive new headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with a sculpture of Prometheus erected out front signaling to the world that RCA, like the Greek god, would bring the fire of knowledge to mankind.
And bustling away in RCA’s massive lab in Camden, New Jersey, Vladimir Zworykin and his team were perfecting electronic television, with Zworykin maintaining all along that he had conceived of it well before Farnsworth.
Farnsworth wasn’t confrontational by nature, but on this matter he’d exhausted all patience and filed suit with the Patent Office to officially answer the question: Who invented electronic television, him or Zworykin?
RCA lawyers hit back with a two-pronged line of attack. First, they claimed Zworykin had patented a television-like device in 1923, making him the true inventor. Second, they insisted it was preposterous to believe that some kid with “only a grade school education” conceived in 1922 an innovation that had eluded “great men of science and skill” for years.
Honor, not just money, was at stake, and Farnsworth and his lawyer, Donald Lippincott, took particular umbrage at RCA’s accusation that Farnsworth’s teenage brainstorm in the potato field was pure fantasy. As tangible proof of Farnsworth’s veracity, Lippincott produced one Justin Tolman, in the flesh. By then Tolman was retired, but he well remembered his “brightest student” and had brought with him the aged but still legible piece of notebook paper containing Farnsworth’s original sketches from early 1922.
To vindicate Farnsworth’s claims, Lippincott had one more stellar witness—Vladimir Zworykin, who had said in Farnsworth’s Green Street lab that he wished he had invented the image dissector himself. Zworykin admitted to making the statement but claimed that he was just being polite. Lippincott scoffed at this, along with the notion that Zworykin’s 1923 patent resembled electronic television in any meaningful way.
The Patent Office’s ruling came in at almost fifty pages. Farnsworth began reading it line by line but eventually gave up, lost in the dense legalese, and skipped to the end. There, in the nine-word conclusion, was all he needed to see: Priority of invention is awarded to Philo T. Farnsworth.
“How many kids in Rigby do you think know who Farnsworth is?” I ask Sergeant Mike as we grab lunch at the deli in Broulim’s supermarket.
“Most of them have a general idea. They learn about him in school, and the local museum is named after him.”
I tell Mike that I’d recently been browsing through my old high school U.S. history textbook to see if Philo Farnsworth was mentioned. He wasn’t. Nor was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin (from the Civil Rights Movement) or nineteen-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who discovered the Clovis archaeological site.
“It’s amazing when you think of how many young people have had an impact on history,” I say to Mike, “and yet in textbooks meant for the very same age group, they’re ignored.”
While we’re eating, one kid after another comes up to say hi to Mike. At first I think they’re wisely paying deference to the officer who might one day be pulling them over for speeding or some other infraction, but their affection seems genuine. A boy about sixteen or seventeen plunks down next to us and leans his head against Mike’s shoulder.
“How you holding up?” Mike asks.
“I’m all right,” he says, clearly not.
They talk for a few minutes, and after he leaves, Mike turns to me and says, “That poor kid. His brother was killed last week in a terrible accident.”
“Drunk driving?”
“No, he was climbing a metal fence at the baseball field when the top of his head hit a wire dangling from a light pole, and it electrocuted him.”
“Jesus.”
Another teenage boy walks by and, playing it cool, gives Mike a high five without stopping.
Mike and I get into a deeper conversation about history, and I learn that it’s a lifelong passion of his. When I ask why it matters to him, he surprises me by speaking of history in practical terms.
“I think the more that people, especially young people, know about where they live, the more pride and ownership they feel about the place, and the less likely they are to disrespect or vandalize it.”
“History as crime fighter,” I say. “I like that.”
And I think he’s right. Even though I’m only a tourist, I’ve become a little possessive about the towns I’ve visited after immersing myself in their past.
As far as anyone can determine, Phil Farnsworth himself never returned to Rigby, Idaho. One calamity after another kept him scrambling just to stay solvent. A year after his paten
t win over RCA, he and Pem sailed to England to meet with the business partner most responsible for Farnsworth’s financial survival—John Logie Baird. Baird had given up on mechanical television, and he coordinated with the BBC to license Farnsworth’s electronic model for $50,000. Together, they would take on EMI/RCA, which was also hoping to dominate the European market, and they planned to showcase their superior system at London’s Crystal Palace exhibition in December 1936. (The architectural wonder was inspired by New York’s Crystal Palace, where Elisha Otis presented his safety elevator in 1854.) But Farnsworth was once again the victim of unbelievably bad luck: on November 30, 1936, the exhibit hall caught fire, reducing his high-tech cameras and monitors, all of them irreplaceable, to globs of melted plastic and glass. The BBC ended its agreement with Baird and Farnsworth and opted to partner with EMI/RCA instead.
RCA was moving aggressively back in the States, too. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, David Sarnoff “introduced” commercial television to the masses and went on to publicly crown himself the Father of Television. Despite securing a licensing arrangement with RCA in the aftermath of his lawsuit, Farnsworth knew that within a few years the deal would be irrelevant once his major patents expired and became fair use. The already high-strung inventor became so anxious that his doctor suggested he start smoking just to calm down.
Farnsworth did find some measure of solace whenever he returned to the old farmhouse in Brownfield, Maine, that he’d bought in 1938 and had spent long hours restoring. In October 1947, two days before he was scheduled to meet with his insurance agent to make certain the property was fully covered after all its renovations, the place burned down. “That’s enough,” Phil said to Pem while walking through the charred remains of his home and laboratory. “Let’s get out of here.”
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 24