Television’s Overlooked Inventor Gets His Due at Last

Philo T. Farnsworth is hiding in plain sight wherever you look. He is unseen yet impossible to miss.

Unknowingly, the average American home affirms Farnsworth eight hours each day. When he died--March 11, 1971--millions paid their heedless respect by watching “Ironside,” “Bewitched” and “The Jim Nabors Hour.”

Philo Farnsworth, you see, invented television.

And in this 75th anniversary year of TV’s first successful demonstration (on Sept. 7, 1927, he transmitted the image of a horizontal line across the room in his San Francisco lab), the secret is starting to get out.

Some may yet dispute Farnsworth’s status as the father of television, but any lingering doubts reside in the misconception that the Radio Corp. of America was TV’s creator. This is a version of history RCA was promulgating even as its boss, David Sarnoff, was trying to crush the former Idaho farm boy who stood in his way.

It’s quite a tale, vividly told in a pair of new books: “The Boy Genius and the Mogul” by Daniel Stashower and “The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit and the Birth of Television” by Evan I. Schwartz, who, in an interview, concedes that until a few years ago, he, like nearly everyone else, was unaware of Farnsworth.

“I had heard the name. You can’t forget the name,” Schwartz says. “But then I had these questions: Who was this guy? How could you invent the defining technology of the century and remain virtually anonymous? That’s quite a trick.”

Schwartz, a Boston-based journalist with a futuristic bent whose books include “Digital Darwinism” and “Webonomics,” couldn’t get Farnsworth out of his mind. And as he learned more about Farnsworth’s defiant quest, he rediscovered a truism: The wisdom for tomorrow can be found in lessons from the past.

Schwartz knew what he had to do. In December 1999, he caught a plane to Indiana to meet with Farnsworth’s widow, Pem, then 91. Schwartz’s book was underway. With the same relentlessness he displayed in life, “Farnsworth just wouldn’t let go of me.”

One story will suffice to explain the inventor’s hold on Schwartz and fellow Philo-philes.

Plowing his father’s potato field in 1921, the 14-year-old lad, already dead set on inventing TV, was lost in concentration as he pondered the next piece of the puzzle. Suddenly he saw his answer in the parallel furrows he was carving: A TV image likewise could be electronically scanned, row by row, onto a picture tube.

True to the brainstorm of a prodigy at his plow, TV in the present day still works the way Farnsworth imagined it that morning.

Of course, even in the 1920s, other theories for creating “telegraph pictures” were afoot.

The chief rival was “mechanical television,” which proposed a rotating disk punched with holes to codify an image in motion. But despite the best efforts of research engineers at General Electric and AT&T;, that led nowhere.

Ultimately, Farnsworth would go head to head with RCA’s chief television engineer, Vladimir Zworykin, and the vast resources of a company whose boss had no intention of losing either a financial windfall or eternal bragging rights as the father of TV.

With that in mind, Sarnoff waged a war not just of engineering one-upmanship, but also of dirty tricks, propaganda and endless litigation.

In 1935, the courts ruled that Farnsworth, not Zworykin, was the inventor of electronic television.

But thanks to Sarnoff, money woes and the lost years of World War II (which put TV broadcasting on hold), the clock ran out on Farnsworth’s patents before he could profit from them.