The Boy Who Invented TV: The Boy Who Invented TV

What government leaders were doing in Washington, the latest in the arts and sciences, whether sports teams were winning or losing, new information of any kind—it trickled in haphazardly by mail.

Two new machines captivated Philo as he grew up. One was a hand-cranked telephone, purchased by a neighbor.

Each time the repairman came, Philo bombarded him with questions.

Philo tinkered with broken motors, reels of wire, old tools.

He devised gadgets to hook up to the generator—anything to make his chores easier, like installing lights in the barn.

So he attached a motor with pulleys to the lever to make it churn on its own, leaving him extra time to read.

An article called “Pictures that Fly Through the Air” stimulated him.

Scientists were having no luck—so far their ideas resulted in crude mechanical devices that used whirling disks and mirrors.

Then he almost fell off his plow seat. All his thoughts fused together.

Instead of seeing rows of dirt, he saw a way to create television: breaking down images into parallel lines of light, capturing them and transmitting them as electrons, then reassembling them for a viewer.

Mr. Tolman, the senior chemistry teacher, noticed that this freshman devoured books the way other students ate popcorn.

Philo’s latest hero was Albert Einstein, with his controversial new theory of relativity.

Philo’s latest hero was Albert Einstein, with his controversial new theory of relativity.

Usually Philo spoke little, with a halting voice. But when he could share his knowledge of science, he was a different boy.

His teacher was boggled.

Philo ripped a page out of the notebook he always kept in his shirt pocket. He scribbled a diagram of an all-electric camera, the kind of converter he envisioned. An Image Dissector, he called it.

On weekends he organized “radio parties” so his friends could gather around one of the bulky wooden cabinets and listen to the new stations.

Thanks to his obsession with television, Philo had already lost one girlfriend, who called him too much of a dreamer.

He met two California businessmen, and over dinner one night, he took them through a step-by-step explanation of his Image Dissector: a camera tube that would dissect an image into a stream of electrons, converting them into pulses of electrical current.

That was the best thing about television, he said—it would let families and whole communities share the same stories. By making people less ignorant of one another, he went on, it would teach and inspire. Maybe even lead to world peace.

He filed for several government patents that would protect his ideas for the next seventeen years.

Pem learned to use a precision welder to make tube elements—everything had to be built from scratch.

Pem learned to use a precision welder to make tube elements—everything had to be built from scratch.

Finally they got the lights, wires, and tubes to work in unison.

With his brainstorm in the potato field, Philo Farnsworth may have won the race to invent TV.

Then Justin Tolman, Philo’s proud high school teacher, came forward with that old notebook drawing. In 1934 the U.S. Patent Office awarded priority of invention to Farnsworth.

RCA simply disregarded the ruling and debuted TV in 1939, at the World’s Fair in New York City.

RCA simply disregarded the ruling and debuted TV in 1939, at the World’s Fair in New York City.

By 1955 an estimated half of the population of America simultaneously watched the grand opening of Disneyland on TV.

His epitaph reads, “He loved his fellow man.”