The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television, by Evan I. Schwartz. HarperCollins, 2002, 323 pages.

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Meet Philo. T. Farnsworth

by Miles Fowler

Once, when I was a child, I asked my parents, "Who invented television?" I knew that Edison had been credited with inventing the light bulb and that Bell had invented the telephone. (I didn't know then about Elisha Grey, who invented the telephone at the same time but did not get his patent application in as quickly as Bell.) It seemed reasonable to suppose that every invention had its lone creator. To my surprise, my parents didn't know who had invented television.

After some persistence on my part, they suggested that television was an invention so complex that it had to have had many inventors. In some sense this seems true. Thousands of engineers refined television, but refinement of an idea is not invention. In "The Last Lone Inventor," Evan I. Schwartz presents a convincing case for Philo Farnsworth as the lone creator of television as we know it today. The idea of television went back to the 19th century, but all systems before Farnsworth were essentially species of what is called mechanical television. Conceived by Paul Nipkow and brought as near as it could be to perfection by John Logie Baird in 1925, mechanical television was a dead-end that could not produce a clear picture and was as different from Farnsworth's electronic television as Newtonian physics is from Einsteinian physics. As well as telling the technical story of this invention in layman's language, Schwartz tells the story — by turns inspiring and saddening — of how Farnsworth won official credit for his invention from the United States Patent Office only to have that credit robbed from him by the public relations machine of RCA. (Although he had a genuinely visionary side, there was more than a little of Jim Taggart in RCA president David Sarnoff, as we will see.)

In 1930, Farnsworth was granted three television patents (for which he had applied in 1927), one of which was for the crucial image dissector tube. This device makes it possible to turn light bouncing off of an image into electron beams so that they can then be reassembled and projected onto a specially coated screen. In 1934, RCA tried to interfere with these patents, claiming that RCA's then chief research engineer, Vladimir K. Zworykin, had invented television earlier than Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth the following year, pointing out that, as originally written up, Zworykin's idea would not have worked, and that, indeed, Zworykin's claim to have demonstrated his invention in 1924Ð25 was abysmally lacking in documentation as well as credibility. RCA appealed this decision, but it was upheld in 1938. In that year, however, RCA had Zworykin's patent rewritten to include Zworykin's Iconoscope, a device he did not actually invent any earlier than 1929. Reluctantly, the Patent Office granted the revised application under the 1923 filing date. While it was not unusual to grant a revised patent keeping the earliest date (Farnsworth revised his own patent after 1927 because the Patent Office recommended that his original request for one patent be split into three), the 15 years that had elapsed on Zworykin's application and the addition of a device not included in the original patent made for mischief that has bedeviled scholarship of television history ever since. Taking advantage of the false impression that Zworykin's invention of the iconoscope preceded Farnsworth's patent for the image dissector by four years, Sarnoff announced at the 1939 New York World's Fair that RCA had invented television. (Actually, this claim was further misleading because Zworykin worked for Westinghouse, not RCA, in 1923, and he did not officially join RCA until 1930.) Although in testimony before Congress in 1940 Sarnoff was gracious enough to allow Farnsworth a secondary place after RCA, in 1952, he broadcast a documentary on NBC television — then owned by RCA — crediting the invention to himself and Zworykin, never mentioning Farns-worth at all.

Some writers still suggest that Farnsworth lost some of his patent battles with RCA. In truth, Farnsworth never lost any key patent case regarding television. He never contested RCA's claim to have made certain improvements on his television system. RCA was entitled to patents on those improvements once it acknowledged that it had based its system on his. It was in the court of public opinion that the self-promoting Sarnoff triumphed over Farnsworth, who, modest to a fault, lacked the money, influence, and ruthlessness needed to beat Sarnoff at his own game.

Part of the problem of the public's perception is confusion about what constitutes the invention of television. The distinction between mechanical and electronic television was crucial to the patent conflict between Farnsworth and Zworykin. The terms used to describe this distinction are themselves actually misleading. All television systems contain an electrical component to transmit the signal. To be accurate, what we refer to as mechanical television is really a hybrid mechanical and electrical or electronic system. By the time Zworykin and Farnsworth came along there were already experimental mechanical television systems. Zworykin had actually learned of mechanical television from one of his professors when he was a university student in Russia. What Farnsworth invented was the first fully electronic television system. Unlike the earlier mechanical systems, which scanned an original image by means of moving disks containing pinholes that pick up the light bouncing off of the object being televised, Farnsworth's image dissector directly converted light into beams of electrons, eliminating the need for any moving parts in the image scanning process. Unlike the earlier mechanical systems, Farnsworth's all-electronic television produced images that a viewer could actually recognize rather than the murky shadows reported by those who witnessed demonstrations of mechanical television. What Zworykin seems to have done in his 1923 patent application was to propose an electronic improvement upon what was essentially still a mechanical scanning system, and the U.S. Patent Office later declared that it doubted that it worked. This is why Zworykin's patent application languished for 15 years while Farnsworth's patent cleared in three.

What was worse than Zworykin's fraudulent claim to priority was that he visited Farnsworth's San Francisco laboratory in 1930 and stole the design for the image dissector. (It is a credit to Zworykin's brilliance if not his sense of ethics that he did not need to steal drawings or written documents but instead carefully watched a dissector being built and later had his own laboratory staff build one based on his memory.) Sarnoff later made his own visit to Farnsworth's lab, with the hapless Farnsworth hoping that RCA was about to propose a licensing agreement. Instead, in what Schwartz characterizes as wishful thinking, Sarnoff told Farnsworth, "There is nothing here that I need." Sarnoff's foolish stubbornness was further demonstrated by his subsequent offer to buy Farnsworth's patents for a flat $100,000 with no hope for any licensing fees. When Farnsworth rejected it, his financial backers supported him because they had already sunk that much into his work; to accept such an offer would have meant their taking no profit whatsoever. Schwartz speculates that, had Sarnoff been willing to offer at least $500,000, Farnsworth's backers might have overruled him and sold away the patent rights. Sarnoff's stubbornness was expensive: RCA spent at least $50 million trying to "get around Farnsworth," yet the best the company came up with was the image orthicon (for which the Emmy Awards — originally intended to be called the Immy Awards — are named), which was little more than a first-rate refinement of Farnsworth's original invention.

In 1939, while RCA was telling the world that it had invented electronic television, the company's chief patent attorney, Otto Schairer, and the president of the newly formed Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation, Edwin "Nick" Nicholas, were in the midst of several months of difficult negotiations. "Only the clear underlying fact that neither company could get along without the other kept the discussions alive," recalled George Everson, one of Farnsworth's earliest financial backers. Finally, in September 1939, RCA agreed to pay the Farnsworth Corporation $1 million plus royalties. Farnsworth would also be able to license his inventions to Philco, Zenith, or any other television manufacturer. After 13 years (Farnsworth's original startup, Crocker Research Laboratories, was formed in 1926 in San Francisco primarily by officers and directors of Crocker Bank, some of whom were on the board of the new corporation), it looked as if Farnsworth and his investors might finally receive some remuneration for all of the hard work and money that went not only into inventing television but also into battling RCA. Presenting a clear example of how capitalism can make strange bedfellows, Schwartz writes:

"The licensing pact put Sarnoff and Farnsworth in an odd position. For the first time, they were on the same side, with the same interest in pushing television forward to their mutual benefit. If any other company wanted to enter the television business, they now needed two licenses, to make use of the patents of both. The meaning was clear: Philo T. Farnsworth had denied David Sarnoff the television monopoly he had coveted, but now that their battle was over, they needed to find a way to cooperate. (p. 272)

Unfortunately, there were obstacles yet in the way. Even before the settlement between the two companies had been reached, World War II broke out. Television broadcasting, which had begun to be commercialized in Britain and Germany in the late 1930s, using separate and not always legal licenses from Farnsworth and RCA, came to an abrupt halt. (The BBC Television Service unceremoniously went off the air on September 1, 1939, during the broadcast of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, not to return to the air until June 7, 1946. No explanation for the shut down was televised; viewers had to turn on their radios in order to learn what was happening.) British television makers immediately converted to the manufacture of radar screens. Soon, American television factories would also put their commercial operations on hold for the duration of the war. Both RCA and Farnsworth began manufacturing military electronics instead of television sets.

While RCA had the resources to wait out the storm, Farnsworth Corporation did not, and Farnsworth's key television patents expired in 1947 — just weeks before American television sales skyrocketed. RCA's most important patents, on the other hand, didn't expire until after 1955. Although Farnsworth Corporation operated for a decade, financial crisis forced it to sell off the remaining television patents that had been granted later than the original key ones, and the proceeds of this sale were insufficient to keep the company afloat.

In 1949, International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) purchased the company. The new management kept Farnsworth on as vice president of research, but he never went back to television, designing other types of electronics instead. He eventually took up a personal quest to develop fusion energy — a quixotic project that nearly bankrupted him in his retirement.

Farnsworth only appeared on television once during the 1950s, on the CBS game show I've Got a Secret, the very premise of which was sobering: the panelists had to guess the occupation or claim to fame of a mystery guest, and Farnsworth won $80 and a carton of cigarettes because no one could guess who he was or what he had done. In a touching denouement, however, Farnsworth was able to watch the first Apollo moonwalk almost two years before his death. His widow told Schwartz that Farnsworth's heartfelt declaration was, "This has made it all worthwhile" (297).

Schwartz is clearly partisan throughout, but his favoring "Phil" Farnsworth's claim is difficult to fault since the evidence appears to be overwhelming. On the other hand, his account of Farnsworth, the man, largely based on interviews with the inventor's widow, Elma "Pem" Farnsworth, may be sanitized. Mrs. Farnsworth certainly remembers her husband as having faults, chiefly a serious drinking problem, but although she admits that she once considered divorce because of his drinking, the problem was not sufficient to dissuade her from remaining married to him for 45 years. Farnsworth may have been the mild and virtuous man he is portrayed as being. Why else would he have eschewed every opportunity to stick it to RCA? Schwartz notes that Farnsworth believed in self-reliance to the extent that even when Congress called him before anti-monopoly hearings, expecting him to testify against RCA, he made only innocuous points and even presented evidence that tended to absolve RCA of charges that it was trying to soak consumers by selling inferior radio tubes. (RCA, still in the midst of its dispute with Farnsworth, had, in fact, asked him to present this evidence!) Thanks in part to Farnsworth's refusal to feed it ammunition, a Congressional witch hunt into the communications and other industries was stopped cold. Farnsworth's only certifiable weakness, his tendency to drink too much, appears in hindsight to have been related to bouts of depression — no doubt caused or exacerbated by his major disappointments in business.

On the other hand, Schwartz portrays Sarnoff with what can best be described as a mixture of equally guarded admiration and contempt. Sarnoff, an immigrant who worked his way up the hard way as a newspaper boy and telegraph operator, is given credit for appreciating what television could mean to posterity, but, for him, this was all the more reason to want undue credit for it. Like Jim Taggart in "Atlas Shrugged," Sarnoff relied on pure public relations to create the perception that he, not Farnsworth, was the "Father of Television." According to RCA, in fact, this was Sarnoff's official title! (Although RCA made the distinction of referring to Zworykin as the "Inventor of Television," his 1966 National Medal of Science Award calls him the "Father of Television," too. Because the statue of Farnsworth that stands in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. — a gift from Farnsworth's native Utah — labels him the "Father of Television," we can see that television clearly needs the paternity test that Schwartz and other Farnsworth biographers have recently provided.)

Schwartz seems to admire Sarnoff's nerve even as he is appalled by his ruthlessness. While one danger for industry in making deals with leviathan is that government will ultimately take the upper hand, Sarnoff thrived on cleverly manipulating this system to his own advantage. RCA (as Schwartz never lets the reader forget) was originally created by a Congressional edict making it both a subsidiary of General Electric and a government-approved monopoly on radio-related patents. Sarnoff, however, always dreamed of being the top dog, not having to answer to GE or anyone else in business; so when Congress proposed to knock down the "radio combine" it had created, Sarnoff played a successful game of "don't throw me into that briar patch" when he leaked his "secret fear" that GE would be forced to spin off RCA as an independent entity. Incredibly, the government fell for it.

Among Sarnoff's many failings was an inability to understand that not only will posterity behave in accord with the lofty ideals we espouse, but it will also recapitulate our most shameful behavior. He wanted to leave the twin legacy of a world brought together in understanding by the miracle of instantaneous electronic communication and a corporation that would benignly but profitably bring about and maintain that communication. Instead he left a legacy of participation in industry-government pacts that sometimes stifle innovation while pretending to promote it, and a corporation that did little else than survive off of its patents and past glory until, finally, after Sarnoff's death, RCA and its subsidiary, NBC, were reabsorbed into the original parent company.

The fact that atrocities can be broadcast in the age of television for an indignant world to see, but still are allowed to occur, can be explained by the ability of those who control television to edit and editorialize the most appalling events so that no one sees them for what they are. Sarnoff, himself, was the first television spin doctor when he took credit away from Farnsworth by virtue of the fact that RCA always had the bigger podium, from the 1939 World's Fair to ownership of NBC. It must be a testament to Farnsworth's modesty or the lack of savvy public relations at his corporation that no one approached NBC's rival, CBS, about using their airwaves for an early announcement that Farnsworth was the true inventor of television.

Besides his interviews with Farnsworth's widow, Schwartz had access to the archived records of RCA and Farnsworth's notebooks as well as other primary sources. Although he did not need to refer to many secondary sources, an evaluation of works such as Albert Abramson's "The History of Television: 1884–1941" might have put the continuing controversy over Zworykin versus Farnsworth into context. Readers who wish to read such an approach to the controversy should see Paul Schatzkin's "The Boy Who Invented Television."

Schwartz says that he became interested in the development of radio and television as well as Farnsworth's conflict with RCA while researching the history of the more recent computer revolution. Both developments illustrate what happens when a new technology is introduced and individuals, corporations, and governments compete to manipulate and benefit from it. Even before Schwartz pointed this out, I had noticed a rough parallel between RCA's position in the mid 1920s and that of IBM 60 years later. RCA, too, faced the problem of myriad startups violating its radio patents and not being able to fight them all in court. RCA's solution was to offer licensing agreements to these competitors and only sue the few who refused to submit. The result was that RCA only had 25 percent of the radio market, but it earned licensing fees from the other 75 percent. Of course, for IBM to benefit from this history lesson, they would have had to take steps before designing their personal computer. IBM put their computer on the market with only one patented component and never saw the PC clones coming. All that their competitors had to do was reverse engineer the one patented component. When the courts accepted reverse engineering as a legitimate process that did not violate IBM's sole patent, Big Blue's monopoly on personal computers that could run on Microsoft software came to an end, and the upshot of the much-ballyhooed war between IBM and Apple was that Microsoft (and the consumer to a large extent) won it. In contrast, RCA was in a stronger position than the one in which IBM later found itself because the radio corporation owned so many separate patents that no one could have gotten around all of them.

I particularly enjoyed Schwartz's background information, trivia, and unexpected side trips. For example:

• Farnsworth spent his childhood along Idaho's Snake River, and he went to the same high school in Rigby that individualist-novelist Vardis Fisher had attended a decade earlier.^*
• It was while plowing a field in the Snake River country that Farnsworth realized that just as he went back and forth making rows in his father's field, so an electron beam could scan and reconstruct an image line by line. A most primitive technology thus inspired quite a modern one.
• I was also intrigued by the account of Philo and Elma Farnsworth's 1937 trip to Germany to collect royalties on his television technology, which had been used in the 1936 broadcast of the Berlin Olympics seen by 160,000 people in specially equipped German theaters. It was "the largest television audience yet" (228). Meeting with Paul Görz, the president of Fernseh, which was one of two main television companies in Germany at the time (the other, Telefunken, had made its questionable licensing deal with RCA), Farnsworth was told that the Nazi government refused to allow Fernseh to pay him anything. In fact, the German government cancelled the Farnsworths' exit visas, and it was only with the help of Görz that the couple managed to get out of the country. Not surprisingly — in light of what Schwartz's book demonstrates people will do when given the opportunity to rewrite history in their own favor — the historical website for the now defunct Telefunken AG not only awards the firm full credit for televising the Olympics but also attributes the invention of the electronic television camera to one of Telefunken's scientists.
• Some of Farnsworth's assistants were to become luminaries in the world of technology. One of Farns-worth's early lab assistants was Russell Varian, the inventor of the klystron tube and owner of the first high-tech business to open in Silicon Valley. Another veteran of Farnsworth's lab was Harry Lubcke, who would one day become president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
• William Paley, head of CBS radio and television, disliked David Sarnoff with such a passion that he made sure to purchase CBS's first television equipment from Farnsworth in 1937. Oddly, Schwartz does not mention the role played by another Sarnoff-hater in the expansion of Farnsworth's company in 1937: Walter Gifford, president of AT&T, made a lucrative, mutually beneficial cross-licensing deal with Farnsworth in that year. The deal with AT&T is mentioned, but Gifford's personal involvement is not. Gifford's dislike for Sarnoff, mentioned in an earlier chapter, was nakedly bound up in anti-Semitism, so I must wonder whether Schwartz was so disgusted with Gifford that he omitted his name later in the book so as not to associate him with Schwartz's hero.
• Cinema legend Mary Pickford sat in front of Farnsworth's experimental television camera and complained that his lights were hotter than any she had encountered on a movie set. This was undoubtedly true. Indeed, one of Zworykin's creditable improvements on Farnsworth's camera was finding a way to increase its sensitivity in nearer to normal lighting.
• In 1931, Farnsworth formed a partnership with the Philco Company in Philadelphia and thus found himself conducting his research across the Delaware River from RCA's Camden, N.J. facility. The two companies began monitoring each other's television transmissions — undoubtedly the only people who could have done so at the time. This allowed Farnsworth to see for the first time that his competition was improving the picture quality of his invention by leaps that would make it necessary for him to license their patents just as they would need his.

Schwartz played a role in seeing that Farnsworth was at last officially recognized at the 2002 Emmy Awards. Another Farnsworth biographer, Paul Schatzkin, sat next to Farnsworth's widow as host Conan O'Brien introduced her as the first woman ever to appear on a television screen. (She and her brother were Farnsworth's first lab assistants.) David Sarnoff's son, Tom Sarnoff, was also present as his father was recognized — almost in the same breath — for seeing that Farnsworth's invention was refined and brought to the world.

As to why the question of priority in the invention of television matters, I cannot substantially improve on Schatzkin's answer: "It matters because the suppression of the true story deprives us of some important knowledge of the human character. It tempts us to believe that progress is the product of institutions, not individuals. It tempts us to place our faith in those institutions, rather than on ourselves."

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*See my articles in Liberty, "Bad Boy of the WPA," March 2002, and "The Forgotten Individualist," May 2002.

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