This just showed up in my Google alerts:
World’s Fair Predicted TV’s Future
(link to actual article since deceased)
The article is a look back at the introduction of television at the NYC World’s Fair in April, 1939 – the one where David Sarnoff famously and pompously pronounced, “Now we add sight to sound.”
“Philo Farnsworth, one of TV’s inventors who had famously sparred with NBC chief David Sarnoff over patents, scoffed at the fair organizer’s (and Sarnoff’s) declaration that TV had been born on April 30, 1939: “The baby is being born with a full beard,” Farnsworth said…. Nevertheless, television as we now know it was born 75 years ago this month.”
That last line is more bullshit corporate propaganda. “Television as we know it” was “born” on September 7, 1927, in Fansworth’s laboratory in San Francisco. The NBC sponsored demonstration at the World’s Fair in 1939 was more like the commencement exercise.