As the industry ramps up for Sunday’s 2024 Emmy Awards telecast, have a look at the trophy’s namesake: The Image Orthicon tube. It is based on patent number 2,087,683 – which was awarded to Philo T. Farnsworth in 1937.*
This is the camera tube that supplied most or the television signals in the late 1940s and 1950s. Uncle Milty, Sid Caesar, Edward R. Murrow, and Elvis on Ed Sullivan were all beamed into our living rooms from the electronic eye of the Image Orthicon.
The name of the “Image Orthicon” starts with the name of Farnsworth’s first electronic camera tube, the “Image Dissector,” which ushered in the age of video in 1927. The patent that covers the Image Orthicon discloses an improvement on the original invention described as a “low velocity scanning” technique.
The “Image Orthicon” was nicknamed the “Immy,” which morphed into “Emmy” and became the name of the annual awards that recognize achievement in television.** The name was suggested in 1949 by then president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Harry Lubcke – who was part of the Farnsworth ‘lab gang’ that delivered video to the planet in San Francisco in the late 1920s. You could look it up.
So: no Farnsworth, no Image Orthicon, no, Immy, no Emmy. We’d still be staring at our radios.
We are less than three years out from the 100th anniversary of the arrival of video on the planet.
More at TVCentennial.com
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*The provenance of the Image Orthicon is just one more facet of video history that has been swept under the rug. Most accounts attribute the Image Orthicon to engineers at RCA. But the real story is that once the new tube took shape at RCA, ongoing litigation with Farnsworth revealed that the underlying technology was subject to a Farnsworth patent. When delivering their verdict in the Image Orthicon -related case, one of the patent examiners – who at that point was fed up with RCA’s efforts to commandeer Farnsworth’s inventions – was overheard saying “we would have given them the name ‘Image Orthicon’ too, but that was trademarked separately. So the myth of the “RCA” Image Orthicon persists to this day.
** In addition to the familiar ‘prime time’ Emmy awards, local Emmys, and various ‘creative arts’ awards, since 2003 the Television Academy has presented an annual Philo T. Farnsworth Award for Corporate Achievement to recognize “…an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have significantly impacted television technology and engineering.” Which is of course ironic, considering that a corporation (RCA) is the primary reason most of us who gaze at screens all day have never heard of the individual who delivered video to the planet in 1927.
And so it goes.
It is also worth noting that the TV Academy inducted Farnsworth into its Hall of Fame in 2013.