So I learn from my Google Alerts this morning that there will be a new "children's book" biography of our man Farnsworth released on September 8, 2009.  It's called The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth and according to the synopsis at Amazon.com: Plowing a potato field in 1920, a 14-year-old farm […]

TV Academy to honor NASA for televising the Apollo 11 moon walk:   The space agency will receive the Philo T. Farnsworth Award in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the innovations behind the broadcast of the first moonwalk. The "Philo T. Farnsworth Award" is a special Emmy that

That’s what Philo T. Farnsworth said to his wife as they sat in their living room on July 20, 1969, and watched Neil Armstrong take “one giant leap for mankind.”  Watched.  Because of the thing that he invented 40+ years earlier.  It’s been said before, but bears repeating: amazing as the moon landing / walk

I haven't watched it yet, but I'm recording episodes of a new SciFi (now "Syfy Network") Channel Series called "Warehouse 13."  It's an action-adventure thing essentially constructed around the concept of the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As described in to WIRED,the show is about… …a cavernous warehouse filled

…when it keeps getting in the way of a “good story”?  I just found this item in a sidebar to a Wall Street Journal Online story about how Netflix plans to maintain its business after the demise of DVDs and all video delivery converts to some form of streaming.  The sidebar attempts to summarize the

Much of the second act of Aaron Sorkin's play The Farnsworth Invention revolves around  Philo Farnsworth's supposed inability to find solutions for the low-light sensitivity of his Image Dissector tube.  This interpretation is very much the "RCA version" of the early pre-history of television — that Farnsworth's Image Dissector was a fatally flawed device, and that television could only be commercialized after the principal of "light storage" was introduced in Vladimir Zworykin's Iconoscope. 

When I met Aaron in San Diego in the spring of 2007, I showed him an Image Orthicon tube — the tube that really made television practical in the 1940s and 50s — and tried to explain to him how much of the art in that device — art that effectively solved the "light problem" — was traceable to Farnsworth patents. 

Now comes a letter from another reserarcher / historian with an engineering background, one Eduardo Zeron, who validates what I've been saying about the origins of the Image Orthicon.  He also takes issue with some of the points in my old "Who Invented What and When" essay, which points I am happy to see corrected.

But those corrections don't undermine the important assertion, that Farnsworth had his own solutions to the "light problem," that those solutions found their way into the technologies that made television popular, and that the historical interpretation in The Farnsworth Invention is what is fatally flawed here, not the invention itself (nor the inventor).

Mr. Zeron's letter:

Dear Paul Schatzkin.

I really enjoyed your Farnovision chronicles web page, especially the Part 10 where you point out the historical importance of Farnsworth's U.S. patent 2,087,683, and how Sarnoff needed to buy it (for $1 million) in order to sell his Image Orthicon.

Farnsworth invented both the Orthicon and the "scanning with low speed electrons" in his U.S. patent 2,087,683 (filed on April 26, 1933, and granted on July 20, 1937). The only difference between the Farnsworth Orthicon and the RCA one is the fact Farnsworth projected the optical image and did the scanning in the same side of the target plate, while RCA projected the optical image and did the scanning at the opposite sides of the target.

From another review of the Houston production: [Sarnoff] wanted RCA to bring TV to the world, not some nobody like Farnsworth. Eventually, after a complicated, backbiting battle of wills and endless patent wars, RCA emerged triumphant, leaving Farnsworth in the forgotten dustbin of history. Sorkin remedies the historic injustice with this lively pas de deux

  Houston: The First Fight Over The TV, At The Alley. Two people arguing over electrons, cathode rays and how much light it takes to transport a moving image across the country may not sound like a riveting evening to most people — but they'd be pretty much wrong. For its final show of the

EmilyStyle: Weekend Round-Up: City Lights. From there, we rode our bike down to North Beach to a memorial service for analog TV (switched off at midnight last Friday). Philo T. Farnsworth invented TV in a workshop on Green Street in 1927. The Green Street Mortuary Band played taps, people made speeches about the history of

Do we take any solace knowing that the museum in Rigby, Idaho, lives on? Sarnoff ‘museum’ must go – NJ.com. It was here, at the former RCA headquarters on Route One, where the man RCA employees called “the general” preserved much of his legacy: the first internal computer memory device, Sarnoff’s trophies and correspondence, thousands