Episode 192 is the start of our new monthly segment, Famous Utahn’s! We decided to start the year off with Mr. Philo T. Farnsworth.
You may have heard that he created the technology that is was made it possible for modern day television, and you wouldn’t be wrong! However, the story goes much deeper. Philo was born in Indian Creek, Utah just outside of Beaver in 1906. When he was a young child his family moved to Idaho which is where he started experimenting because the farm had an electric generator!
Philo had been reading science magazines in his young age and had been reading about ideas that were buzzing from the late 1800’s about television and how to turn a picture into electrical pulses. By the way, he was just 14! It was on his family farm when he was plowing that he got the idea of how the pictures could be created.
Fast forward to 1926/1927, Philo was in San Francisco where hackaday.com reports, ” By 1926 he had convinced a pair of what we’d now call “angel investors” to plow $6,000 into his image dissector idea, and he moved to California to chase his dream. Having already done some development on the tube at BYU, he was ready within a few months to apply for a patent, and on January 7, 1927 he submitted an application simply entitled “Television System.”
During this time, Farnsworth would have a foil. RCA hired Vladimir Zworykin and broadcasting head, David Sarnoff, put him to work knowing that they had to be part of the television creation. Then it just became a messy legal battle. According to Hackaday, “Sarnoff offered Farnsworth $100,000 for his image dissector patent. Farnsworth stubbornly refused this princely sum, setting off a patent war between the boy inventor and one of the largest corporations in the country. RCA sued Farnsworth, claiming that Zworykin’s 1923 patent had priority even though he had never made a working version of his iconoscope, or “reduced to practice” in patent law parlance. RCA won the first round, as well as a subsequent appeal, but in 1934 a judge sided with Farnsworth, partly on the strength of handwritten notes made by Justin Tolman, Philo’s high school chemistry teacher. Tolman had sketched out Philo’s blackboard drawings at Rigby High all those years before, providing support for Farnsworth’s claim that he thought up the idea of electronic television at least a year before Zworykin’s patent was issued.”
Philo had well over 300 patents in his lifetime. His genius was mind-blowing. From Investor.com, In July 1969, when Neil Armstrong used a Farnsworth camera to transmit his moon walk, the amazed inventor turned to his wife and said, “This has made it all worthwhile.” Unfortunately he died in 1971 at the young age of 64. If you want to pay respects, he is buried in the Provo, Utah cemetery. His statue has been standing at the US Capitol building, since 1989. It is about to be replaced with one of voting pioneer, Martha Hughes Cannon. There is a battle between Utah and Idaho about who should get the statue. Obviously we vote Utah!
Some of the resources we used for this episode: The New Yorker. The Official Website of Philo T Farnsworth. HackADay.com Website. Investor.com Website.
Some of the resources we used for this episode: New York Times. The Official Website of Philo T Farnsworth. HackADay.com Website.
Music By: Folk Hogan; Bootleggers Dance