September 3, 1928
Black Light Machine
In which the world first learns of electronic television
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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 19th century – when, clearly, what was required was an approach that embodied the advances in physics that arose in the early 20th 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 Phil2 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