In 1927, Philo Farnsworth was the first inventor to transmit a television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. The image transmitted was a dollar sign. Farnsworth first demonstrated it to the news media on September 1, 1927. Farnsworth developed the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions. He filed for his first television patent in 1927 (pat#1,773,980.) Although he won an early patent for his image dissection tube, he lost later patent battles to RCA. Philo Farnsworth went on to invent over 165 different devices including equipment for converting an optical image into an electrical signal, amplifier, cathode-ray, vacuum tubes, electrical scanners, electron multipliers and photoelectric materials.

Farnsworth was born in 1906 near Beaver City, Utah, a community settled by his grandfather (in 1856) under instructions from Brigham Young himself.

With only two years of high school behind him, and buttressed by an intense auto-didacticism, Farnsworth gained admission to Brigham Young University.

The death of his father forced him to leave at the end of his second year, but, as it turned out, at no great intellectual cost. There were, at the time, no more than a handful of men on the planet who could have understood Farnsworth's ideas for building an electronic-television system, and it's unlikely that any of them were at Brigham Young. One such man was Vladimir Zworykin, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He went to work for Westinghouse with a dream of building an all-electronic television system. But he wasn't able to do so. Farnsworth was. But not at once.

He didn't do it until he was 21. By then, he had found investors, a few assistants and a loving wife ("Pem") who assisted him in his research. He moved to San Francisco and set up a laboratory in an empty loft. On Sept. 7, 1927, Farnsworth painted a square of glass black and scratched a straight line on the center. In another room, Pem's brother, Cliff Gardner, dropped the slide between the Image Dissector (the camera tube that Farnsworth had invented earlier that year) and a hot, bright, carbon arc lamp. Farnsworth, Pem and one of the investors, George Everson, watched the receiver. They saw the straight-line image and then, as Cliff turned the slide 90[degrees], they saw it move--which is to say they saw the first all-electronic television picture ever transmitted.

History should take note of Farnsworth's reaction. After all, we learn in school that Samuel Morse's first telegraph message was "What hath God wrought?" Edison spoke into his phonograph, "Mary had a little lamb." And Don Ameche — I mean, Alexander Graham Bell — shouted for assistance: "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you!" What did Farnsworth exclaim? "There you are," said Phil, "electronic television." Later that evening, he wrote in his laboratory journal: "The received line picture was evident this time." Not very catchy for a climactic scene in a movie.

So after reading this you still may be asking, "Who really invented the television". The question may be simple, but clearly the answer is not. Before Walter Cronkite, and before 20/20, literally hundreds of scientists and engineers contributed to the development of the appliance that now dominates "our living room dreams." How can we single out any single individual and say, "it all started here"?

The historical record is sadly devoid of references to Farnsworth. Though the oversight has begun to improve in recent years, it is still entirely possible to open an encyclopedia and read that electronic television began when "Vladimir Zworykin invented the Iconoscope for RCA in 1923 ..."-a sentence that manages to express no less than three historical inaccuracies. The most conspicuous error-the "1923" date-conspicuously fixes Zworykin's name chronologically before Farnsworth's 1927 patent filing, and often renders Farnsworth to the status of "another contributor" in the field.

Some historians have gone so far as to suggest that Farnsworth and Zworykin should be regarded as "co-inventors." But that conclusion ignores Zworykin's 1930 visit to Farnsworth's lab, where many witnesses heard Zworykin say "I wish that I might have invented it." Moreover, it clearly ignores the conclusion of the patent office, in its 1935 decision in Interference #64,027, which states quite clearly "priority of invention awarded to Farnsworth."

LINKS:

1. MIT
2. Wikipedia
3. National Inventors Hall of Fame
4. Farnsworth Archives