Background
He was born near Beaver, Utah, the son of Lewis Edwin Farnsworth, a farmer, and Serena Amanda Bastian, a homemaker. He was raised in a Mormon family of limited economic means.
He was born near Beaver, Utah, the son of Lewis Edwin Farnsworth, a farmer, and Serena Amanda Bastian, a homemaker. He was raised in a Mormon family of limited economic means.
The family moved frequently throughout Utah and Idaho, and Farnsworth spent his youth working on the family farm and occasionally attending school. In 1922 the Farnsworths moved to Provo, Utah. Farnsworth's career was devoted to the study of physics, particularly electronics. At an early age he took an interest in fixing farm machinery and understanding how it operated.
In 1919, when the family moved to Rigby, Idaho, the new farmhouse contained back issues of science and technical journals, which Farnsworth avidly studied.
In 1922, at the age of fifteen, he explained his ideas to Justin Tolman, his science teacher at Rigby High School.
In 1922, after completing his high school education, he earned an electrician's license.
The following year he enrolled in courses at Brigham Young University, but for financial reasons soon had to withdraw.
In 1926, after creating a corporation, Everson, Farnsworth, and Gorrell, they moved to California to acquire financial backing for Farnsworth's work.
In 1923 Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian emigrant working for Westinghouse, had designed an electric television transmitter and in 1924 or 1925 demonstrated it for Westinghouse executives. Zworykin's system operated on different principles from that of Farnsworth's; in addition, Zworykin's demonstration did not consistently produce clear images, and Westinghouse executives chose not to pursue that line of research.
Farnsworth's image dissector worked, however, and in 1927 he applied for and subsequently received patents for his image dissector and a cathode tube receiver. During the next three years Farnsworth improved upon his early effort. The image dissector had low sensitivity to light and Farnsworth subsequently developed and patented several improvements to the camera tube.
He likewise built an electric scanning generator, a device that gave him the first all-electric television system. The inventor and his backers also sought to promote his work.
In 1928 Farnsworth held press conferences and in his laboratory produced television images of movie stars and prominent scientists. Through those efforts and published descriptions of his system, Farnsworth and his work received considerable attention. In 1929 Farnsworth and his associates formed a new company, Television Inc. While promoting his achievements, Farnsworth sought to maintain his independence. General Electric and Radio Corporation of America offered to hire Farnsworth and purchase his inventions.
He rejected both overtures, but by the early 1930's his corporation was in difficult financial straits and backers questioned his opposition to selling.
In 1931 he signed a contract with Philco Corporation for financial support of his corporation and continued control of his patents in exchange for assisting Philco in developing television. Farnsworth moved to Philadelphia, and Philco was soon competing with RCA in experimental broadcasting.
In 1934 Farnsworth quit Philco and with the help of his company, Television Inc. , now sought to display the new medium to the public. In 1934 he presented the first public demonstrations of his system at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, and the next year opened his own station, W3XPF, in Philadelphia.
Two European firms began to use Farnsworth's system for broadcasting, and in 1937 a patent-sharing agreement with American Telephone and Telegraph considerably enhanced his status.
In 1938 he established Farnsworth Radio and Television, and by 1939, equipped with a manufacturing plant in Fort Wayne, Ind. , he was ready to make television a commercial reality. Despite Farnsworth's success, the viability of his enterprise and of commercial television depended on developing agreements with RCA. David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, had sponsored research and experimentation on television throughout the 1930's.
Although interested in the commercial development of television, Sarnoff was faced with the fact that Farnsworth still controlled crucial patents. Zworykin's iconoscope provided RCA with an improved television camera, but Farnsworth's camera tube, now enhanced by the use of low voltage electron beams, still possessed certain advantages.
For several years Sarnoff convinced the Federal Communications Commission to delay the implementation of commercial television, but in 1939 RCA agreed to purchase Farnsworth's patents and to pay him continuing royalties for the use of his inventions.
Although the agreement with RCA was a personal and financial triumph for Farnsworth, it removed him from further active research in the field.
Farnsworth Radio and Television began manufacturing television sets in 1949, but ran into financial problems and eventually became a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Farnsworth, while receiving numerous awards for his work in television, then turned his attention to research on atomic fusion.
Throughout the remainder of his life Farnsworth, an intense, high-strung individual, was beset by medical problems and spent much of his time on a family ranch in Maine. He died in Salt Lake City, Utah.
He was raised in a Mormon family of limited economic means.
Quotations:
Farnsworth said, "There had been attempts to devise a television system using mechanical disks and rotating mirrors and vibrating mirrors — all mechanical. My contribution was to take out the moving parts and make the thing entirely electronic, and that was the concept that I had when I was just a freshman in high school in the Spring of 1921 at age 14. "
When Moore asked about others' contributions, Farnsworth agreed, "There are literally thousands of inventions important to television. I hold something in excess of 165 American patents. " The host then asked about his current research, and the inventor replied, "In television, we're attempting first to make better utilization of the bandwidth, because we think we can eventually get in excess of 2000 lines instead of 525 . .. and do it on an even narrower channel . .. which will make for a much sharper picture. We believe in the picture-frame type of a picture, where the visual display will be just a screen. And we hope for a memory, so that the picture will be just as though it's pasted on there. "
He married Elma Gardner, whom he had met at Brigham Young, on May 27, 1926; they had four children.