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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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