The Birth Of Television I

In 1922 a 14-year-old farm boy first sketched his idea for television for his science teacher. The boy's name was Philo T. Farnsworth and he knew very little about electronic theory. Three years earlier his family had moved to a farm in Idaho. The farm had electricity. Philo became fascinated with it and one day when his father and several adults were puzzling over why their farm generator had stopped, Philo surprised everyone by stepping in and repairing the generator. Philo loved to experiment by building electric motors in an attic loft that soon became his own inventor's lab. One night in the dead of winter Philo read an article about the possibility of combining radio and motion pictures and transmitting this new media instantly into homes just as radio was now doing. He had read science fiction accounts that used spinning mirrors, but they didn't seem to be fast enough to capture the light of a moving image. Philo pondered the problem for months and in a moment had an inspiration - why not capture light in a jar and transmit it in a series of individual lines of electron beams. You could magnetically deflect each line one at a time so that together they would form a moving picture. Philo was eager to show his science teacher the new idea. And so the excited boy sketched electrical diagrams on the blackboard. "This is my idea for electronic television." "What's television?" his teacher asked. They spent several weeks working on the idea until it seemed that Philo's idea would work. Despite family hardships, Philo was determined to go to college and managed to be admitted to Brigham Young University. In his spare time he learned about vacuum tubes and cathode ray tubes, but without money he had no hope of building a working model of his television idea. With his father's death in 1923 Philo left college and took a series of jobs. He and his friend Cliff both took correspondence courses in radio technology. Now calling him self Phil he shared his idea of television with Cliff. Cliff advised Phil to not publish the idea because the idea was too good to give away. One of Phil's bosses in these odd jobs was a man named George Everson who seemed interested in Phil's television scheme. But surely, George asked, G.E. or Bell Labs must have found the answer already. Phil explained that they were still working with mirrors and disks. As Phil explained his idea more fully, his boss agreed to put up $6000 so Phil could test his idea. Two other partners came into the venture and agreed that Phil should have 50% equity in the company. Phil wanted to do the work in Los Angeles where he would have access to the resources necessary for an unusual laboratory. Phil had fallen in love with the sister of his old friend Cliff. He was 19 when he married his sweetheart Pem. Together they would move to a new home in Los Angeles. Their new home was a one bedroom apartment in an interesting suburb - Hollywood. The dining room became Phil's lab. One of the many new skills he needed was glassblowing. But all of the glassblowers he met said what he envisioned was impossible. This was just another one of the technical challenges Farnsworth would have to overcome. Meanwhile, his investor realized that Phil, like most new entrepreneurs, had underestimated how much money this would take. So George Everson met with people who might want to take a chance on an unproven idea. To make sure that these wild ideas would work, George asked Phil to present his case to an experienced electrical engineer. When the engineer agreed Phil's idea just might work, the money followed. Phil's television laboratory needed equipment that would have to be invented and he needed people. One of the first was his old friend and now brother-in-law Cliff Gardiner who was quickly named the chief glass blower. Like Phil, Cliff had only a high school diploma and no knowledge of glassblowing. But on January 7, 1927 Phil applied for his first patent. This is considered the official date of the invention of television. Phil and Cliff were working on the first television camera tube which they called the "Image Dissector." It would dissect an image line-by-line with a pulsating electrical charge and then transmit these elements. They discovered a rare chemical called cesium which had the photo-electric properties needed for their "Image Dissector." Cesium was widely used in radio tubes, but the only way they could get enough was to buy cases of radio tubes and smash them to remove the rare ingredient. Their television receiver was built from a chemistry flask. This became the picture tube which Phil called the "Image Oscillite. It took months of building their television system before they could even test it. The first tests showed only a glow when current flowed through the receiver. It took several more months of redesign work, but then on September 7, 1927, Pem, George, and Cliff gathered to see the latest test. The image Phil attempted to transmit was simply a black horizontal line painted on a glass slide. He reasoned that if the receiver could show whether this was horizontal or vertical, his test was successful. In a separate room, Cliff dropped the glass slide between the Image Dissector and a bright carbon arc light. Phil, his wife Pem, and his investor George anxiously watched the flickering of Phil's receiver. When the static had cleared, all three could see the glowing image of the straight line in the crude receiver. Cliff rotated the slide and these first television viewers saw the line rotate. Television was born!