100YearsOfTV

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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If David Sarnoff can be recalled for any single ambition, it is his desire to be remembered as the man who singlehandedly delivered television unto the world.

By 1939, Sarnoff was the president of the Radio Corporation of America, the world’s largest manufacturer of radios and phonographs, and the parent company of NBC, the America’s largest radio network.

Over more than a decade starting in the late 1920s, David Sarnoff had spent an estimated $10 million of RCA’s profits (that’s roughly $240 million in 2025 dollars) on television research. Much of that money was spent developing an in-house alternative to Philo Farnsworth’s patents with Vladimir Zworykin’s Iconoscope;^⁠1 the rest was spent on litigation to invalidate or commandeer those patents.  By 1939, RCA’s Board of Directors was starting to question when they might see some sort of payoff from all that investment of time and treasure. 

A Quirky Bit of Gear

The Iconoscope of the mid-late 1930s worked about as well as Farnsworth’s Image Dissector.  Both tubes required prodigious amounts of light to produce a usable picture. But the Iconoscope was a radically different configuration, owing in part to the imperative of circumventing Farnsworth.  But the Iconoscope was such a quirky bit of gear that one RCA engineer expressed his frustration with it by saying “Getting a decent picture out of an Iconoscope took a miracle, a sweat towel, and a stiff drink afterward.”

Meanwhile, Farnsworth had won all but a few very minor cases in his ongoing litigation with RCA . 

By 1939, Farnsworth and his tiny ‘lab gang’ had compiled a portfolio of more than 100 U.S. and foreign patents that covered all the essentials of electronic video: scanning, synchronization, electron beam deflection, and the novel but indispensable sawtooth wave.  On top of the patent office’s 1935 decision (Countdown #97, Priority of Invention) this collection of patents made Farnsworth’s grip in the new art of television all but impenetrable.

All of this uncertainty around the technology meant that the industry could not even discuss the kinds of standards that would necessary for an orderly introduction of the new medium. 

Nevertheless, Sarnoff informed his Board that he was going to launch commercial television, and he had the perfect venue in mind: the 1939 New York World’s Fair. 

The Fair opened to the general public on April 30, 1939.  Sarnoff opened the RCA Pavilion in front of an Iconoscope camera.  

“Now we add sight to sound,” Sarnoff proclaimed, boldly declaring the arrival of “a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society.” At least he was right about that much, if premature by nearly a decade. 

Sarnoff’s proclamation was followed by a brief address by Franklin Roosevelt – the first appearance on television by a sitting U.S. president.  

What RCA’s cranky Iconoscope could not reveal was that the Federal Communications Commission had yet to grant anybody permission to engage in any kind of commercial television broadcasting. 

Only a few hundred people saw the inaugural broadcast, transmitted live by RCA’s experimental station W2XBS^⁠2 in Manhattan to a few hundred receivers scattered around the fairgrounds and selected venues in and around New York City. 

For the moment, Sarnoff’s quest was strictly symbolic.  As noted, there were still no national television signal standards, and there were fewer than 1,000 TV receivers, most of them owned by RCA or department stores.  The sparse programming RCA offered in the months that followed was still strictly experimental, cobbled together from news summaries, boxing matches, and vaudeville acts.

You Spent How Much??

The true nature of the World’s Fair event was spelled out in the May 1939 edition of Fortune magazine, with a headline that called the future of television “A $13,000,000 ‘If.'”  

Most of that gamble was attributed to the fortune that Sarnoff had spent on television technology and litigation over the previous decade.  In contrast, Fortune estimated Farnsworth’s expenditures at something in the neighborhood of just $1 million.  Such is the difference between actually inventing something and trying to engineer and litigate around it. 

Unfortunately, the Fortune article also helped shape much of the public’s early grasp of television’s origin story, by introducing at least two lingering  myths. 

In the first paragraph, the article says that… 

Long after the World Fair has become one of grandfather’s stories, April 30 will still be the day when they formally started television service in the US. 

In fact the occasion only signaled the beginning of a new phase of experimentation, one in which the public was invited to participate so long as they could pony up between $200 – $600 ($5,000-$13,000 in 2025 dollars) for a 5″ to 12″ television set. 

Then, in one of its more enduring misstatements, Fortune asserts that… 

…television is not an invention at all, but the product of thousands of often unrelated experiments … pieced together with the painstaking care of a paleontologist assembling the brittle, calcified shards of a dinosaur’s skull.

So begins the false construct that television was “too complex” to have been invented by any single individual.” 

While it’s true that television in the late 1930s was the culmination of a broad and costly engineering effort, Fortune conveniently ignores Farnsworth’s profound, singular breakthrough – the one invention that made everything that followed possible – including and especially the so-called “launch” at the New York World’s Fair in the spring of 1939. 

That event was very much unlike what had transpired in Britain three years earlier.  There, trials were conducted, technologies were evaluated and selected, and only then did the government agencies authorized to do so permit the BBC to begin regularly scheduled broadcasting.  

The comparison makes Sarnoff’s World’s Fair gambit seem all the more desperate.

Tears In His Eyes

That Fortune article does, however, offer the first hint of what was soon to come. After years of contentious litigation, the article speculates that “a cross licensing agreement between RCA and Farnsworth is imminent.” 

Indeed, a few months after the Fortune article, RCA accepted the first license in its corporate history that required the company to pay royalties for the use of an outside inventor’s patents, to the tune of at least $1 million.  

Legend has it that RCA’s attorney had tears in his eyes as he signed the agreement.  

But that was in late September, 1939 – just a couple of weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

The real advent of television in America would have to wait until World War II was over.  

The 1939 World’s Fair did not in fact mark the true birth of a new mass medium^⁠3. But it was a turning point — the moment television was publicly declared not merely an experiment, but as a promise of corporate destiny bearing a presidential seal of approval. 

Newsreel footage of the 1939 World’s Fair he literally cost us six months what was he gonna do not sure narrate

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¹ The history promulgated over decades by RCA cites Zworykin as the inventor of the Iconoscope. But the defining feature of the Iconoscope  – the “storage principle” – was first discovered and patented by the Hungarian physicist and inventor Kalman Tihanyi. In 1926, Tihanyi filed a patent describing a system with a mosaic photoelectric ‘modules’ in which each element “stores” a charge proportional to light intensity. He subsequently filed related patents in Britain (1930), France (1931), and the United States (filed 1930, granted 1938) under the title “Radioskop.”

Tihanyi’s innovation added an important improvement to existing video camera technology (i.e. Farnsworth’s Image Dissector) by generating a stronger electrical signal from available light. RCA and Vladimir Zworykin later incorporated this same charge-storage principle into the iconoscope, which is why Tihanyi is often regarded as the uncredited engineer whose insight made Zworykin’s camera tube truly functional.

It should also be noted that that the “storage principle” is one of several components designed into the Image Orthicon tube of the late 1940s and early 1950s, while other elements derive directly from Farnsworth’s Image Dissector. 

² RCA started conducting television transmissions in 1931 with an experimental transmitter licensed as W2XBS located atop the Empire State Building. The call sign meant “W-2-Experimental-Broadcasting-Station.  When the FCC finally authorized commercial TV broadcasting – two years after Sarnoff’s NY World’s Fair “launch” – W2XBS became WNBT, for “NBC Television.”  This is the station / call sign from which all of NBCs early programs – Texaco Star, Theater, Howdy Doody, The Today Show, etc.– were broadcast to the New York metropolitan area.  In 1954, the station changed its call sign to WRCA-TV in order to align with NBC’s parent company. In 1960 the call letters became WNBC-TV (or  just “WNBC”), which the station still uses today .

³ In 1989, People Magazine published a special edition observing “TV’s 50th Anniversary” – pegging the occasion to “4/30/39: Commercial TV begins at the N.Y. World’s Fair.”  The statement is false on its face. The FCC did not permit commercial time to be sold on television until 1941.

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Despite the tremendous engineering strides made in the decade after its invention, by 1936 the commercial adoption of television in the United States remained mired in litigation between Farnsworth – who had invented it – and RCA’s David Sarnoff – who wanted to control it.

There were no such impediments in the United Kingdom, where John Logie Baird started using the BBC radio airwaves for experimental television transmissions in 1929.

At the start, Baird’s mechanical ‘Televisor’ was capable of only 30-lines per frame, producing blurry, flickering silhouettes not much larger than a postage stamp.

By the mid 30s, Baird’s system was capable of 240 lines at 25 frames per second, but even that herculean achievement paled in comparison to fully electronic systems on both sides of the Atlantic that were already producing more than 400 lines at 30 frames per second.

Sticking with his antiquated approach cost Baird dearly.

The Race Is On

In 1933 his floundering enterprise was rescued by British Gaumont, the U.K. branch of the French Gaumont Film Company, founded by Léon Gaumont in Paris in the 1890s.  Gaumont’s primary interests were in film production and exhibition, but they were also wary of the impact that television could have on their business. This concern prompted their alliance with Baird who, if nothing else, had become a recognized name in the industry.

The good news for Baird was that for the first time he had sufficient capital to continue developing his mechanical television system. The bad news for Baird was that his new benefactors could see what an anachronism they’d invested in, and, after reducing Baird  to a nominal role in his own company, they went looking for something closer to the state of the art.

And here, not surprisingly, is where the race for television in Britain begins to unfold along the same lines as the race in the United States.

By 1934, RCA had finally developed a video camera tube that served David Sarnoff’s quest to ‘work around’ Farnsworth’s patents – Vladimir Zworykin’s awkward but useful ‘Iconoscope.’  At about the same time,  Britain’s Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) began experimenting with an identical tube it called the ‘Emitron.’  The common lineage of the Iconoscope and the Emitron is too complex to go into here, but suffice it to say they were the exact same tube.

With television on its corporate horizon, EMI formed an alliance in 1934 with British Marconi, the venerable pioneer in wireless communication.  Under the umbrella of a new subsidiary called Marconi-EMI Television Co., Ltd., EMI contributed its research facilities, where Isaac Shoenberg led its television laboratory; Marconi contributed its radio transmission and broadcasting expertise, and – most importantly – its close personal and corporate connections to the BBC.

Well Surprise Surprise!

In addition to close ties to the BBC, EMI was closely affiliated with… wait for it… whole else but… the Radio Corporation of America!

RCA and EMI were very similar companies with very similar pedigrees operating on opposite sides of the Atlantic.^⁠1  Their oddly incestuous  relationship went a step further in 1934, when the two corporate behemoths negotiated a patent cross-license.  That arrangement gave RCA access to EMI’s cutting-edge audio technology.^⁠2 in exchange for EMI gaining access to RCA’s electronic video technology – including the recently introduced Iconoscope.  It wasn’t long before the Iconoscope’s twin, the Emitron, started showing up in experimental British television studios.

The arrangement created dire consequences for John Logie Baird.

All of its alliances and resources gave Marconi-EMI Television access to the state-of-the-art in both content production and broadcasting.

Baird, on the other hand, was still strapped to his spinning wheels and mirrors.

There was only one place British Gaumont could turn to keep the Baird name competitive: to America, and Philo T. Farnsworth, who was invited to sail across the Atlantic to showcase his system in 1934.  Two weeks later Farnsworth and Company sailed back to America with his first bona fide patent license – and a check for $50,000 cash. 

It was not hard to see the limitations of Baird’s mechanical system, but the BBC had to be judicious in its proceedings.  In 1934, the British Post Office — which regulated broadcasting  like the FCC in America — created the Television Advisory Committee, chaired by Lord Selsdon, to evaluate  the competing systems and recommend how the BBC should proceed.

But between Marconi-EMI’s access to RCA’s technology – and their long standing relationship with the BBC – Baird never really stood a chance.

The BBC built two studios at the Alexandra Palace, on a hilltop on the outskirts of London: Studio A for Baird, and Studio B for EMI.  From an antenna atop the “Ally Pally,” the dueling signals broadcast over a radius of 30 miles, effectively covering all of greater London.

Though still technically just the start of the competitive trial, EMI treated its inaugural electronic broadcast from Studio B on November 2, 1936 with the enough pomp and fanfare to infer that it was truly the official start of television service Britain.  Most historians recognize that broadcast as the world’s first regularly scheduled television broadcast service.

On The Air!

In a documentary film of the event – produced by focusing a 35mm film camera at a cathode ray tube display – you can hear the voice of BBC radio veteran Leslie Michael announce “Vision is on… Sound is on. ” Then stage hand blows a whistle, signals a thumbs up and “the station goes on the air.”

On roughly 500 television sets scattered around London – in dealers’ showrooms, laboratories, and the homes of BBC executives and  staff – probably fewer than 1,000 actual viewers saw a white-tied orchestra conductor wave his baton, followed by the satin gowned figure of renowned English actress and singer Adèle Dixon stepping before the camera to sing a song composed specially for the event:

A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays 

Is all about us in the blue…

A filmed-from-the-screen record of the first BBC-TV broadcast

Baird also transmitted something that day, but he was still relying on a 240 line mechanical scanner and could only transmit film, rather than a live studio scene like the EMI broadcast.

Despite his license with Farnsworth, Baird was unable to make effective use of the Image Dissector – even after Farnsworth himself retuned to London in the summer of 1936 to try to get Baird back in the game.

Within three months, the results of the trials were so lopsided that the BBC stopped using the Baird equipment entirely, formally ending the “trial” in February 1937.

The BBC’s adoption of EMI’s electronic television effectively marks the end of the mechanical era of television that began with Paul Nipkow in the 1880s.

In 1937, the BBC settled on the EMI 405-line system, making it the world’s first electronic TV standard to be adopted for regular broadcasting. Over the next two years, programming ran at least two hours every day with adaptations of theater, light musical revues, cooking demonstrations, newsreel,  commentary, and interviews. In 1938, the BBC produced its first original television play, The Maker of Dreams.

And then, like everything else about television, the service was suspended with the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939. 

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In the years that followed, nearly every other industrialized country launched some kind of ‘official’ television service.

In the U.S., RCA attempted a premature launch of television service from the New York World’s Fair in April, 1930, well before any signal standards had been settled or the FCC sanctioned commercial television broadcasting. That event will be addressed in Countdown #94.

Want more on the BBC launch in 1936?  I just found a whole documentary about it on the YouTube, but it will not permit an embed so you’ll just have to click here and go there. 

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1. RCA was, in fact, the RCA/Victor Company, the “Victor” part derived from its acquisition of the Victor Talking Machines Company in 1929.  Both Victor Talking Machines and EMI traced their origins to the inventor of the Gramophone, Emil Berliner, and both used Berliner’s logo and motto: the white terrier “Nipper” cocking his head in front of a gramophone speaker and listening to “his master’s voice.” 
2. Among the EMI patents RCA cross-licensed were Alan Blumlein’s 1931 patents for “binaural sound,” which laid the foundation for modern stereo recording and reproduction, describing not only two-channel audio but also methods for cutting stereo grooves into phonograph records. His concepts predated widespread stereo use by decades, yet proved invaluable once magnetic tape and LP technology caught up after World War II. Tragically, Blumlein was killed in 1942 while testing radar equipment, leaving others to profit from ideas far ahead of their time.

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the  Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.

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In the summer of 1936, athletic spectacle, technical innovation, and political propaganda converged in Germany for the first-ever televising of an international sporting event: the Berlin Olympics.  All the major players in the global race for television were on the scene, including the man whose invention nearly ten years earlier made the moment possible: Philo T. Farnsworth. 

Germany’s National Socialist government (aka ‘the Nazis’) – eager to showcase its technological superiority – invested heavily in a television initiative led by Fernseh AG.  Fernseh organized a consortium that combined the engineering expertise of Bosch with the optics of Zeiss Ikon and the radio capabilities of Telefunken.  

Despite all the German expertise, the breakthrough that made the television broadcasts possible came from abroad: In 1934, Fernseh secured a license from Philo T. Farnsworth for the use of his Image Dissector — the revolutionary camera tube at the heart of all electronic video.  For Farnsworth, the license provided some funding for his ongoing legal battle with RCA; For Fernseh, it gave German engineers the technology they needed to accelerate their television development in time for the Games.

Of course, television receivers had yet to find their way into any German homes, so the regime built 25 public viewing halls — known as “television parlors” — in Berlin and Potsdam. These venues, outfitted with projection screens and receivers, allowed audiences of 40 to 100 people to watch the Games in rotating shifts. 

The Fernseh-led consortium employed a hybrid system, utilizing both film and live video.  In some cases, Olympic events were recorded on film, quickly developed and then transmitted through film chains that employed the Farnsworth Image Dissector. While not as immediate as the live transmissions, the workaround improved image quality and reliability.

Notably, Philo Farnsworth and his wife ‘Pem’ (nee Elma Gardner) were present in Berlin during the Olympics. As a guest of Fernseh AG, he witnessed firsthand how his invention was used — not in American living rooms, but in the heart of Nazi Germany. 

Only select events were televised, including track and field, boxing, rowing, and gymnastics. The broadcasts were transmitted via VHF and received via closed-circuit transmission only in the official parlors. For the first time, a relatively large audience could witness live sports from a distance, a feat previously unimaginable.

The 1936 Olympic broadcast was as much propaganda as it was progress. It was designed to project an image of German supremacy in both sport and science. But behind the scenes, the televising was powered by American innovation, and personally witnessed by the inventor whose own country had yet to fully recognize or benefit from his work. 

Over the two-week span of the Olympics, more than 150,000 viewers tuned in as Jesse Owens – a black man from America – won the gold medal in four prestigious track events.  History has long since noted the irony of this black American track star dismantling the myth of Aryan supremacy that Hitler’s Games were meant to establish. And all the drama unfolded through the cameras and viewing halls that were themselves based on an American invention. 

The legacy was immediate and far-reaching. The BBC launched its regular television service the following year, having observed the Berlin model. NBC would follow three years later in the U.S.  

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.

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In April, 1934, the United States Patent Office held its final hearing in Patent Interference No. 64,027 on the “issue of… a transmitting apparatus for television.”  

The contenders in this case were  Philo T. Farnsworth and the engineer spearheading RCA’s television program, Vladimir K. Zworykin.  At issue was Farnsworth’s patent #1,773,980, which was first filed on January 7, 1927 and granted on August 26, 1930 – eight months before one of his backers sent a telegram to another backer declaring “the damn thing works!” 

On the other side of the case, RCA was defending an application that Zworykin had filed for a television system while he was employed by Westinghouse in 1923, which, the patent office would eventually rule, did not work. 

The point of contention  was Claim 15 of the Farnsworth patent, which describes…

“An apparatus for television  which comprises means for forming an electrical image, and means for scanning each elementary area of the electrical image, and means for producing a train of electrical energy in accordance with the intensity of the elementary area of the electrical image being scanned.

This paragraph, first composed by Farnsworth patent attorney Donald Lippincott in 1927, is the legal language that announces the arrival of electronic video on the planet – first in the summer of 1921, in the mind of a 14-year-old farmer’s son, and in the summer of 1927, on a workbench in San Francisco.  

Claim 15 describes the indispensable principle that made real television as know it   possible:  Where the spinning disks of the mechanical systems scanned the light,  Farnsworth’s system was the first that scanned the electrons. 

In 1930 – seven years after applying for his patent – Vladimir Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s laboratory in San Francisco.  At the time, he was still employed by Westinghouse, and was given a three-day tour of Farnsworth’s operations with the understanding that Westinghouse was considering taking a license for Farnsworth’s patents. 

When he was handed a freshly-fabricated Image Dissector tube, everybody present heard him say

This is a beautiful instrument.
I wish that I had invented it.

 Four years later, RCA tried to make the case that he had.

While it’s true that Zworykin did have a working camera tube by 1934 – the Iconoscope – the documentation proves that it was not the same device he’d applied for a patent on in 1923.  That did not stop RCA from making the case, but the evidence was slim, to put it mildly.  

Farnsworth’s case was supported by extensive laboratory records, including the historic note that “the received line picture was evident this time” from the evening of September 7, 1927. 

RCA, on the other hand, was unable to produce any meaningful documentation of Zworykin’s case.  They could not produce a tube from 1923, 1924, or 1925. There were some vague verbal accounts, but those were dismissed by the examiners as unreliable, having been “influenced by later events and knowledge.” In other words, when it mattered most, RCA was unable to produce any evidence that would support Zworykin’s claim to have invented a working Iconoscope in 1923.

RCA tried to derail Farnsworth’s testimony that he had first conceived of his Image Dissector tube as a high school freshman.  Farnsworth’s story stood in stark contrast to Zworykin’s extensive credentials, his education, and his years of service with companies such as Westinghouse and RCA.

Unfortunately for RCA’s attorney’s, Farnsworth clearly recalled discussing his ideas with his high school science teacher in Rigby, Idaho in the late winter of 1922.  A team of attorneys representing both sides of the case ventured out to Salt Lake City, Utah, and tracked down Justin Tolman, who clearly recalled the freshman who had cajoled way into his senior science classes.  Tolman then produced a sketch that Farnsworth himself had drawn for him after class one day.  

Tolman’s recollection, and the sketch he produced, were not instrumental in the Patent Office’s deliberations, because Tolman was not an expert his field.   But that did not preclude a decisive decision on Farnsworth’s favor.  

In its final ruling rendered on July 22, 1935, the patent examiners ruled that “Zworykin had no right to make the case” because

• his 1923 application lacked any language that described the pivotal “electrical image” included in Farnsworth’s patent,
• because the technology described in the application could not produce an electrical image, and..
• because the device now in evidence (the Iconoscope) did not operate in the same manner as the device described in the application. 

After a few more pages of legal discourse, the decision ends with an unequivocal declaration:

Priority of invention is awarded Philo T. Farnsworth.

Unfortunately, this resounding proclamation was followed by one more little sentence: “Limit of Appeal: August 22, 1935.” 

In other words, RCA could still appeal the case; the company waited the full six months to file their appeal, which was not heard until January 1936. The patent office took two months more to consider the appeal, finally upholding the original decision in March, 1936, 

After the initial appeal was denied, RCA’s still had an option to take the case to a civil court – and took another six months before deciding not to. 

This news was welcomed by the beleaguered Farnsworth camp, but there was little cause for celebration, for the pattern was clearly drawn: Farnsworth’s entanglements with RCA would go on for years and placed the future of television in a perpetual state of suspended animation.

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©2025 Paul Schatzkin / Countdown to The Centennial / All Rights Reserved

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The State of The Art

In the 1930s, video technology evolved rapidly in a world-wide race to deliver television to the marketplace.  

In the United States, the principal contestants were the giant Radio Corporation of America and a tiny company spearheaded by the wunderkind inventor from Utah by way of San Francisco, Philo T. Farnsworth. 

RCA had the capital, the technical resources, and the market clout to extend their dominance in all things radio into the nascent new industry of television. 

All Farnsworth had were the fundamental patents for the technology that made the new medium possible. 

But RCA was not willing to concede any ground without a long and drawn out fight over those patents. 

Both companies had introduced technical improvements, but from 1927 on every new technical development in the art of television followed in the wake of the patents that were granted to Farnsworth in 1930. 

From its crude beginnings on a workbench in San Francisco, perfecting electronic video was a complex engineering challenge. After seven years of accelerating progress, television was on the verge of claiming its rightful place in the living rooms of the world.

Into The Belly Of The Beast

Farnsworth relocated his operations from San Francisco to Philadelphia in 1931; RCA’s labs were set up at the old Victor Talking Machines plant across the Delaware in Camden, NJ.  Each could see the others’ progress in experimental broadcasts from either side of the river. 

In the spring of 1934, Farnsworth’s company – rather than capitalizing on its inventions – was mired in litigation with RCA.  Farnsworth’s investors were anxious to get a return on their now-substantial investment.  RCA, with its boundless resources, was in no hurry to surrender the field. 

In this contentious climate, Farnsworth accepted an invitation from the prestigious Franklin Institute of Philadelphia to conduct the world’s first full-scale public demonstration of television in the summer of 1934.

For the occasion, Farnsworth put everything he had learned into a television system suitable for public viewing.  His team fabricated a cathode ray tube receiver the size of a ten-gallon jug, and a camera surprisingly compact even by today’s standards. 

The exhibit was an unprecedented success. There was little advance publicity – only word-of-mouth – but people lined up for blocks when the doors opened in August. The response was so strong that the event, originally scheduled to last ten days, went on day and night for three weeks.

The Disembodied Image

The power of the new medium was demonstrated at the door: Farnsworth placed a camera near the door, and visitors were immediately confronted by their own disembodied image flickering on an equally strategically placed receiver. 

Absent an advance lineup, programs were thrown together on the fly and transmitted from the roof of the Institute to an auditorium downstairs. Vaudeville acts, popular athletes, and a swarm of politicians volunteered to appear before Farnsworth’s cameras. 

The ‘content’ hardly mattered to the audience that assembled in fifteen-minute intervals. The crowds came to witness the realization of the ancient dream of seeing at a distance. For the depression-weary populace, this was a visible, tangible oracle of better times to come.

This Paramount Newsreel is from 1936 – two years after the Franklin Institute exhibition – but offers a pretty good look at how far the technology had come in a relatively short time.

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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic* television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the  Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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The Predecessors

In 1927, radio was still a relatively young medium, but the subject of television was already generating headlines, among them this one in the New York Times on April 8, 1927:

Herbert Hover in Washington “face timing” with AT&T President Gifford in New YorkThe previous day, AT&T President Walter Gifford sat at a terminal in New York and essentially “face timed” with then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was sitting at a similar terminal in Washington, D.C.

The system they used has to be considered the prizewinner for the most bizarre mechanical television system ever devised.

Developed by Dr. Herbert Ives at the recently formed Bell Labs, the transmitting end used the familiar scanning disk that had been the conceptual core  of  television experiments since Paul Nipkow proposed it in the 1884.

But photos of the receiver show an electric motor rigged to an ungainly harness of 2,500 pairs of pairs of individual wires. Each of those wires sent an electrical impulse to a matrix of 50 rows of 50 individual bulbs in a  2 foot by 2 foot display.

The resulting demonstration only rendered 50 blurry lines per frame, but was heralded in the Times as “a triumph.”

“Herbert Hoover made a speech in Washington yesterday afternoon,” the page-one article began. “An audience in New York heard him and saw him.”  

And while the subhead was careful to note that the system’s “Commercial Use in Doubt,” some sense of the new medium’s eventual future was foreshadowed in other parts of the demonstration: Secretary Hoover’s address was followed by a vaudeville comedian who told jokes with an Irish brogue, and then smeared on blackface to continue “with a new line of quips in Negro dialect.”

The feat was replicated across the Atlantic the following year.

John Logie Baird – 1928

Of all the names associated with television before 1927, perhaps none is more prominent than that of John Logie Baird.  Ask anybody in Britain who invented television, and they’ll cite Baird as readily as they recall Shakespeare or Churchill. 

Baird was a somewhat eccentric Scotsman who tinkered with a string of oddball inventions in the 1920s: a rust-resistant glass razor, jam made with paraffin wax, and most famously “Baird’s Thermal Socks” – electrically heated footwear meant to keep feet warm in England’s perpetually damp weather.  None of these ventures amounted to much, but they did emerge from an approach to invention that was equal parts ingenuity, determination, and quirk.

By 1923, Baird’s string of curiosities left him pining for worthier pursuits.  From his boarding house in Hastings, he turned his attention to transmitting moving pictures by electrical means. 

Starting with a homemade Nipkow disk, a tea chest cabinet, bicycle lamps, darning needles, and scavenged radio parts, he began assembling the contraption he called the “Televisor.”  

The results were primitive – ghostly images of the disembodied head of a ventriloquist’s dummy nicknamed Stooky Bill – but they were results.  In 1925, Baird hauled his contraption to Selfridges department store in London for what was widely reported as the first public demonstration of television – and the reason Brits still think he invented it. 

On February 9, 1928, Baird’s acclaim went global when the New York Times reported from Hartsdale, NY: ^⁠1

Persons in Britain Seen Here by Television As They Pose Before Baird’s Electric ‘Eye’

“A man and a woman sat before an electric eye in a London laboratory tonight and a group of persons in a darkened cellar in this village outside New York watched them turn their heads and move from side to side.”

That stellar account is recalled as the first transatlantic transmission of television. 

It cannot be stressed enough that all the publicity surrounding events prior to – and even after – 1927 employed archaic systems based on the electro-mechanics of the 19^th century – when, clearly, what was required was an approach that embodied the advances in physics that arose in the early 20^th century: relativity and quantum mechanics. 

Enter Farnsworth & Co.

That one man had found the path to that approach was first revealed to the public in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle on September 3, 1928 with a headline that read: 

S.F. Man’s Invention To Revolutionize Television

NEW PLAN BANS ROTATING DISC IN BLACK LIGHT

A front-page photo shows Philo T. Farnsworth – sporting a mustache he thought would make him look older than his 22 years – posing with the “sending and receiving tubes for the television system he invented” and reports…

Two major advances in television were announced yesterday by in San Francisco … Philo T. Farnsworth, and local capitalists, headed by W.W. Crocker and Roy N. Bishop, are financing the experiments and have aided him in obtaining basic patents on the system.

NEW PRINCIPLE APPLIED

All television systems now in use employ a revolving disc, two feet in diameter, to break up or “scan” the image….Farnsworth’s system employs no moving parts whatever. Instead of moving the machine, he varies the electric current that plays over the image and thus gets the necessary scanning.

PERFECT MOTION RECORDS

His system … 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… The sending tube which is the heart of Farnsworth’s transmitting set is about the size of an ordinary quart jar that a housewife uses for preserving fruit…

Farnsworth had operated his small laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco in relative secrecy for nearly two years.  The only visitors were friends, family and his financial backers – who wanted to cash in on their investment from the moment its minimal viability was demonstrated.  By admitting the press less than a year after the first successful tests, those investors hoped to raise additional capital if not sell costly the venture outright to one of the larger industrial concerns.

That scenario ran counter to the business model Farnsworth envisioned for himself.  He understood the inestimable value in the portfolio of patents he’d begun to assemble, and fully expected that royalties from those patents would be paid by all the big companies that wanted to capitalize on the new medium of television. That approach, he believed, would leave him free to purse whatever line of invention he chose to pursue in the future. 

But even though the threshold from mechanical to electronic video had been crossed, it was clear –as one backer said after first seeing what his investment had produced – that it would “take a mountain of money as high as Telegraph Hill” to monetize the crude tubes Farnsworth posed with in the Chronicle photos.  

Farnsworth, his wife Elma ‘Pem’ Gardner, her brother Cliff (and the lab’s principal glass blower) and his bride Lola, picked up a copy of the Chronicle from a newsstand on Market Street and momentarily basked in the glow of their sudden fame. Then Phil^⁠2 struck a more sober note about what was likely to come next. 

“This leaves us wide open to our competition,” Phil reflected, his casual tone masking his genuine apprehensions. “We’re still years ahead of the pack, but our inadequate financing means that we will be working under a severe handicap.” 

Then, trying to paint a more sanguine picture, he expressed precisely what made the Farnsworth operation unique: 

“We have something the big companies don’t have. Our small size and method of operating allows us to maneuver like a speedboat alongside their juggernauts. But even speedboats eventually run out of gas. We have our work cut out for us, that’s for sure.”^⁠3

But after that article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, all those “big companies”  that what it wold take to deliver television to the market place now existed in the world – not least among them the same corporations that Farnsworth vowed he would never sell out to. 

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* I am compelled at times to use the word “electronic” to distinguish Philo Farnsworth’s invention from the mechanical systems that preceded it.  I do this largely to mollify other historians, who take a broader view of this record and  insist on the use of that qualifier.  But who are we kidding?  Once television went “all electronic,” it was the only kind that mattered.

¹ Baird’s transatlantic demonstration took place on February 8, 1928, and was reported in the New York Times on February 9.

² This Farnsworth was named “Philo T. Farnsworth” after his grandfather, and so was Philo T. Farnsworth II.  After being teased about his name during a short stint in the Navy in the early 1920s. he dropped the “o” from his name was was known simply as “Phil” Farnsworth for the rest of his life.

³ Excerpt from The Boy Who Invented Television by Paul Schatzkin

[milestone_featured]

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To have the right idea is one thing;
To have the right idea and make it work is everything.

––Roger Penrose

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Television is unique in the annals of invention because of how many ideas that would not work were pursued before somebody finally came up with the right idea – and made it work.

But by the 1920s, all the necessary pieces of the puzzle were on the board. 

Persistence of vision yielded dramatic (and comic) results in motion pictures. Radio waves carried not only telegraph signals but voice and music.  And it was clearly understood that before motion pictures could be hitched onto radio waves, the images would somehow have to be scanned into individual elements and converted into a fluctuating current of electricity. 

The Right Idea

In the first decade of the new century, proposals began to percolate around the idea of using Karl Braun’s cathode ray tube for the purpose of transmitting and receiving moving pictures by wire or radio.   

As early as 1907, Boris Rosing – a Russian physicist and professor at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology –  experimented with a cathode ray tube as a receiver for signals produced by a Nipkow-type mechanical scanner.  Though primitive, this work marked the first time an electronic display was used to reproduce a visual signal. ^⁠1

In 1908 Alan Archibald (A.A.) Campbell-Swinton – a Scottish-born electrical engineer, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a noted authority on X-ray and cathode ray technology – was the first to propose using a cathode ray tube for both ends of a television system in the British science journal Nature.

So the idea of using cathode ray tubes for television was already simmering in the firmament even while the most determined experimenters of the day were still spinning wheels to create television pictures. 

This recreation of a mechanical television system shows that this is about as good as it ever got.

By the mid 1920s, a whole slew of contraptions that reflected the physics of the late 19^th century were built by, among others: Ernst Alexanderson at General Electric, Herbert Ives at AT&T, and the independent experimenters John Logie Baird in Britain and C. Francis Jenkins in the U.S. 

What all these video jalopies had in common was their reliance on the spiral-perforated disk first proposed by Paul Nipkow in the 1880s.  

From Humble Beginnings…

Meanwhile, on the rural frontier of Idaho, the most unlikely of prospects was thinking he might be uniquely suited to the task at hand.  

Philo T. Farnsworth was the 14-year-old descendant of the Mormon pioneers who followed Brigham Young to the Salt Lake valley in the mid 19^th century.  His father earned his living from farming and from hauling freight over the mountains in horse-drawn wagons.  

The boy showed an early interest in science, but it was not until he was 11 years old that had his first personal encounter with electricity, when his family moved to a homestead near Rigby, Idaho.  From journals and magazines he found in a loft, he started to learn the state of the art in science and invention.  He learned about Edison and Tesla, Marconi and Bell, and before he was a teenager had confided in his father his hope that he had been “born an inventor.” 

Somewhere among those dusty pages he read about the still fanciful notion of “moving pictures that could fly through the air” – and television, he concluded, would be just thing with which to launch his career as an inventor. 

Once the objective was in mind, he taught himself everything he could about  cathode ray tubes, electrons, and how they could be manipulated by magnets.  And most of all he studied the theories of Albert Einstein – in particular, that very first 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. 

Which brings us to the thing that most distinguishes Farnsworth from his predecessors (or, in the long run, his competitors).  He was born in 1906 – the year after Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis – meaning that he grew up in a world that started with relativity and quantum mechanics. That fact of fate empowered him with a uniquely native 20^th century perspective from which to approach the riddle he sought to solve. 

And so legend (actually, fact) has it that one day before his 15^th birthday …

…While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, the summer of 1921 found Philo T. Farnsworth… strapped to a horse-drawn disc-harrow, cultivating a field row by row, turning the soil, and dreaming about television to relieve the monotony. 

…The Idea That Would Work

As the open summer sun blazed down on him, he stopped for a moment and turned around to survey the afternoon’s work. In one vivid moment, everything he had been thinking about and studying synthesized in a novel way, and a daring idea crystallized in this boy’s brain. As he surveyed the field he had plowed one row at a time, he suddenly imagined trapping light in an empty jar and transmitting it one line at a time on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons.^⁠2

Finally, somebody had the right idea.  

What remained to be seen was whether this untrained and self-educated teenager could make it work. 

Long story short: The idea for a fully electronic camera tube occurred to Philo T. Farnsworth in the summer of 1921. In the winter of 1922, he drew a sketch of that idea for his high school science teacher.  In 1926 – after four long years during which he expected to find his idea in the next science magazine he opened – some well-heeled bankers set him up with a grubstake and a loft in San Francisco.  In January 1927, he applied for a patent for his idea and went to work to build a fully electronic television system entirely from scratch. 

Farnsworth and his new wife Elma (Pem) Gardner were joined by her brother Cliff, who – with training experience barely the equal of Farnsworth’s – installed himself as the chief glassblower, fabricating the tubes that Farnsworth had first envisioned six years earlier. 

The evening of September 7, 1927 finds the tiny ‘lab gang’ ready to test the latest of several systems they had built over the prior months.  This time, a glass slide with a simple straight line painted on one side was dropped between a bank of bright lights and the camera tube, which Farnsworth had dubbed the “Image Dissector.” 

In the adjacent room, Farnsworth and Co. watched the face of the receiver as it flickered and bounced for a moment. When the system finally settled down, all present could see the straight-line image shimmering boldly in an eerie electronic hue on the bottom of Farnsworth’s magic tubes. 

Farnsworth called out, “Rotate the slide, Cliff.” 

When he did, everybody could see the image on the receiver rotate as well.  

For the first time in history, information was being transmitted from the bottom of one empty bottle to the bottom of another.  

The event was recorded in Farnsworth’s journal:

Or, as one of the investors who witnessed the occasion telegraphed to another, “the damn thing works!” 

The first successful electronic video image, recreated 50 years later

Defining The “Right” Idea

The century since that night in San Francisco in 1927 has  borne out Roger Penrose’s axiom:  Philo T. Farnsworth had the right idea and he made it work. 

Why did Farnsworth’s system constitute the breakthrough that had for so long eluded so many others? 

The answer to that question is revealed in one paragraph of the patent that he’d applied for earlier that year, which was granted as U.S. Patent #1,773,980 in August, 1930^⁠3. Claim 15 in that patent describes: 

An apparatus for television which comprises means for forming an electrical image, and means for scanning each elementary area of the electrical image, and means for producing a train of electrical energy in accordance with the intensity of the elementary area of the electrical image being scanned.

That is the legal language that announces the arrival of electronic video, and the secret is right there in the first clause: the “electrical image.”  

What the Image Dissector did was essentially the opposite of what all the mechanical system did before it.  

The mechanical systems shined bright lights on a subject, and after scanning the reflected light through their spinning wheels, converted the light into electricity. 

Working with a simple, pure, and elegant embodiment of Einstein’s photoelectric effect in a vacuum tube, Farnsworth’s Image Dissector created an electrical counterpart to the optical image and scanned that. 

In other words, the mechanical systems scanned the light. 

Farnsworth scanned the electrons. 

That was a breakthrough of epic proportions what humans could do with quantum forces and particles. 

And here we are, nearly a century later, conducting all most all of our business and communications from screens. 

¹ Among Boris Rosing’s students was another ambitious and aspiring engineer named Vladimir Zworykin.  We’ll get to him later.

² Excerpt from The Boy Who Invented Television by Paul Schatzkin

³ “Decisive” because RCA tried mightily through the 1930s to take possession of claim 15, but was thwarted in patent interference number 64,027 delivered in 1935 which bestowed “priority of invention” on Farnsworth.