Background

Philo T. Farnsworth was born on August 19, 1906, to parents Serena Amanda Bastian and Lewis Edwin Farnsworth as one of their five children in Utah, United States. He had two brothers and two sisters, including a sister named Agnes.

Education

Farnsworth developed an interest in electronics after his first telephonic conversation with an out-of-state family member. He won the first prize of $25 in a pulp-magazine contest by inventing a magnetized car lock.

He excelled in physics and chemistry at Rigby High School. While studying there, he once provided his teacher with diagrams and sketches covering many blackboards to show how the electronic television system could be accomplished practically.

Farnsworth then attended the Brigham Young High School and graduated from there in 1924. His father died while he was still in high school and young Philo assumed the responsibility of sustaining his family.

Later on, he studied at the Brigham Young University and earned the Junior Radio-Trician certification from the National Radio Institute.

After this, Farnsworth was recruited at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis after he earned the country’s second highest score in academy tests. However, he left the academy to take advanced science classes at Brigham Young University.

Through his enrolment in the University of Utah job-placement service, Farnsworth became familiar with philanthropists George Everson and Leslie Gorrell. The duo later on funded Farnsworth's early television research so that he could set up a laboratory to carry out his experiments.

Career

Philo Farnsworth was forced to drop out of Brigham Young University following the death of his father two years later. His plans and experiments continued nonetheless. By 1926, he was able to raise the funds to continue his scientific work and move to San Francisco with his new wife, Elma "Pem" Gardner Farnsworth. The following year, he unveiled his all-electronic television prototype - the first of its kind - made possible by a video camera tube or "image dissector." This was the same device that Farnsworth had sketched in his chemistry class as a teenager.

Farnsworth rejected the first offer he received from RCA to purchase the rights to his device. He instead accepted a position at Philco in Philadelphia, moving across the country with his wife and young children. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Farnsworth fought legal charges that his inventions were in violation of a patent filed prior to his by the inventor Vladimir Zworkyin. RCA, which owned the rights to Zworkyin's patents, supported these claims throughout many trials and appeals, with considerable success. In 1933, the embattled Farnsworth left Philco to pursue his own avenues of research.

Farnsworth's contributions to science after leaving Philco were significant and far-reaching. Some were unrelated to television, including a process he developed to sterilize milk using radio waves. He also continued to push his ideas regarding television transmission. In 1938, he founded the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation in Fort Wayne, Indiana. RCA was ultimately able to market and sell the first electronic televisions for a home audience, after paying Farnsworth a fee of a million dollars.

After accepting the deal from RCA, Farnsworth sold his company but continued his research on technologies including radar, the infrared telescope, and nuclear fusion. He moved back to Utah in 1967 to run a fusion lab at Brigham Young University. The lab moved to Salt Lake City the following year, operating as Philo T. Farnsworth Association.

The company faltered when funding grew tight. By 1970, Farnsworth was in serious debt and was forced to halt his research.

Farnsworth's contributions to science after leaving Philco were significant and far-reaching. Some were unrelated to television, including a process he developed to sterilize milk using radio waves. He also continued to push his ideas regarding television transmission. In 1938, he founded the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation in Fort Wayne, Indiana. RCA was ultimately able to market and sell the first electronic televisions for a home audience, after paying Farnsworth a fee of a million dollars.

After accepting the deal from RCA, Farnsworth sold his company but continued his research on technologies including radar, the infrared telescope, and nuclear fusion. He moved back to Utah in 1967 to run a fusion lab at Brigham Young University. The lab moved to Salt Lake City the following year, operating as Philo T. Farnsworth Association.

The company faltered when funding grew tight. By 1970, Farnsworth was in serious debt and was forced to halt his research. Farnsworth, who had battled depression for decades, turned to alcohol in the final years of his life. He died of pneumonia on March 11, 1971, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Pem Farnsworth spent many years trying to resurrect her husband's legacy, which had largely been erased as a result of the protracted legal battles with RCA. Philo Farnsworth has since been inducted into the San Francisco Hall of Fame and the Television Academy Hall of Fame. A statue of Farnsworth stands at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco.

Achievements

• 

  Philo T. Farnsworth was an American inventor best known as a pioneer of television technology.
  
  For his pioneering work, Farnsworth received the First Gold Medal awarded by the National Television Broadcasters Association in 1944. During his lifetime he also was presented with honorary doctorates in science from Indiana Technical College (1951) and Brigham Young University (1968). Posthumously, the inventor was remembered with a twenty-cent stamp with his likeness, issued in 1983, and his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984. The Philo T. Farnsworth Memorial Museum was dedicated in his honor in Rigby, Idaho, in 1988.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Adaptation Processes in Public School Systems as Illustrated By a Study of Five Selected Innovations in Educational Service in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts 1940

• Invention

  • Philo T. Farnsworth's combination television and radio receiver

    1935

Religion

At his young age, Farnsworth was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church.

Politics

There is no information about Philo Taylor Farnsworth's political views.

Views

At the age of 14, Farnsworth dreamed of using a lens to direct light into a glass camera tube, where it could be analyzed in a magnetically deflected beam of electrons, dissected, and transmitted one line at a time in a continuous stream. And he would have had an even more accurate description.

In 1927, at the age of 21, he produced the first electronic television transmission. He took a glass slide, smoked it with carbon, and scratched a single line on it. This was placed in a carbon arc projector and shone onto the photocathode of the first camera tube.

The first camera tube used a phosphor on the photocathode that was not sensitive to light, as were the phosphors that they developed later. Phosphors, at first, were not really sensitive to light, so the lights used to illuminate objects to be televised were extremely bright and very hot; too much for human subjects to endure.

Many improvements were made in the next few years, and by 1930, Phil's wife Pem was able to sit for the camera for a few moments before she had to turn away. By 1930, Farnsworth produced an all-electronic television image using his wife, Pem, as the first human subject to be transmitted on television. She was again televised in 1931, and she still had to partially turn away from the camera because the lights were so hot, and move away completely after a few moments.

In the fifties, camera tubes were developed that were much more sensitive. Lights could be cooler, and actors were more comfortable. In the sixties, the hot lights returned with the advent of color, at least until television engineers developed better color cameras.

Farnsworth filed Patent #1,773,980 for his camera tube, entitled Television System, on January 7, 1927, and was granted the patent on August 25, 1930, after a long battle with corporate giants.

A second patent was needed to begin the whole television story; Patent #1,773,981 which he obtained for the cathode ray tube (CRT) providing the display tube - the receiver - the television screen.

Personality

According to his wife, Pem Farnsworth, "Phil saw television as a marvelous teaching tool. There would be no excuse for illiteracy. Parents could learn along with their children. News and sporting events could be seen as they were happening."

She added, "Symphonies would mean more when one could see the musicians as they played, and movies would be seen in our own living rooms. He said there would be a time when we would be able to see and learn about people in other lands. If we understood them better, differences could be settled around conference tables, without going to war."

Later in his life, his attitude was tempered by the reality of commercial television programming. His son Kent was once asked about his father's attitude. Kent reported, "I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives. Throughout my childhood, his reaction to television was, 'There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.'"

According to Kent, his father would have reacted very well to cable programming like The Cooking Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, The Learning Channel, and similar fare. "For learning via television to be accessible and worthwhile, he understood it should be fun too. These mini-networks would have pleased, even surprised him."

Interests

• playing violin

Connections

While attending college, Philo Farnsworth met Elma "Pem" Gardner whom he married on May 27, 1926. The couple had four sons: Russell, Kent, Philo, and Kenneth.

Father:

Lewis Edwin Farnsworth

Mother:

Serena Amanda Bastian

Spouse:

Pem Gardner Farnsworth

Pem became her husband's assistant during their entire 45-year marriage. She took care of all correspondence and became an expert draftswoman, preparing many of the technical drawings he needed. She provided encouragement and support that allowed Farnsworth to continue his research.

Son:

Russell Farnsworth

Son:

Kenneth Farnsworth

Son:

Kent Farnsworth

Son:

Philo Farnsworth

Acquaintance:

Vladimir Zworykin

Acquaintance:

John Logie Baird

References

• Philo T Farnsworth Donald Godfrey examines the genius and the failures in the life of Philo Farnsworth as he struggled to be both inventor and entrepreneur.
  2001
• Philo T. Farnsworth: The Life of Television's Forgotten Inventor A biography of the persistent inventor whose interest in electricity led him to develop an electronic television system in the 1920s.
  2003
• The Teen Who Invented Television: Philo T. Farnsworth and His Awesome Invention As the son of a farmer, a curious fifteen-year-old boy examines the process of electrons carried by radio waves in order to create the first electronic television, as well as one hundred other patents throughout his life.
  2007
• The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television Based on original research, including interviews with Farnsworth family members, The Last Lone Inventor is the story of the epic struggle between two equally passionate adversaries whose clash symbolized a turning point in the culture of creativity.
  2003
• Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery of an Invisible Frontier An intimate biography of Philo Farnswoth, "Father of Television," by his wife, looks at how television got its start and through production, plus a look at some of Philo Farnsworth's other inventions.
  1990
• The Boy Who Invented Television: A Story of Inspiration, Persistence, and Quiet Passion The Boy Who Invented Television traces Farnsworth's "guided tour" of discovery, describing the observations he made in the course of developing his initial invention and revealing how his unique insights brought him to the threshold of what might have been an even greater discovery-clean, safe, and unlimited energy from controlled nuclear fusion.
  2004