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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.