Philo Farnsworth Sketched Television in a Potato Field at Fourteen
A Mormon farm boy in Idaho realized in 1921 that an electron beam could scan an image one row at a time, just like the rows under his plow. Six years later, at age twenty, he filed the patent. The fight to keep it from RCA consumed the rest of his life.
In the summer of 1921, on a farm outside Rigby, Idaho, a fourteen-year-old boy named Philo T. Farnsworth was disking a potato field. He had been reading recent issues of Popular Science and Radio News, both of which had been speculating about how "television" — a word that did not yet refer to anything real — might eventually work. The leading proposed approach involved spinning mechanical disks with holes punched in spirals, which would chop a scene into a sequence of light pulses that a receiver could reassemble. It was crude. It would never produce a watchable picture.
Looking down at the parallel rows the disk plow was cutting in the field, Farnsworth had the idea that defined the next century of broadcasting. You don't need spinning disks. You need an electron beam in a vacuum tube, deflected by magnets, scanning an image one row at a time, exactly like the rows of furrows in the field. Same principle as a plow, but at sixty rows per second, and using electrons instead of steel.
He drew the diagram on a chalkboard for his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, the next school year. Tolman kept the drawing.
The patent
Farnsworth filed for US1773980 — "Television System" — on January 7, 1927. He was twenty years old. He had a small lab in San Francisco, funded by two California investors who had taken a risk on a Mormon farm boy with no formal engineering training. On September 7, 1927, in that lab, he transmitted the first all-electronic television image: a single line, displayed on a receiving tube. Six months later, he transmitted the dollar sign, projected from a glass slide. The image was unmistakable. Working television existed.
The patent issued on August 26, 1930.
The RCA fight
David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America, had been planning his own television empire for years. RCA's own engineering team, led by Vladimir Zworykin, was working on a competing system. In 1930, Sarnoff sent Zworykin to "tour" Farnsworth's San Francisco lab. Farnsworth, naive about industrial espionage, gave the tour. Zworykin reportedly remarked, on seeing the working image dissector, "this is a beautiful instrument. I wish I had thought of it myself." He went back to RCA and filed competing patents.
The patent fight ran for four years. RCA was the most powerful company in American broadcasting. It had never, in its history, paid royalties to anyone — it was always the licensor, never the licensee. It claimed prior invention, claimed Farnsworth's design was obvious, claimed the patent was invalid.
The case turned on Justin Tolman's chalkboard. The chemistry teacher, by then in his sixties, took the stand at the Patent Office hearings and reproduced — from memory and from notes he had kept — the diagram his fourteen-year-old student had drawn in his class in 1922. The hearing examiner ruled for Farnsworth in 1934. RCA, for the first time in its corporate history, agreed to pay royalties.
What didn't happen
The royalty agreement was for a million dollars over ten years, plus per-unit licensing. By the time television manufacturing finally took off after World War II, Farnsworth's patent had expired (1947, seventeen-year term). The royalties he did receive were eaten up by years of legal fees. He spent his later career on fusion-reactor research. He drank heavily. He gave up television entirely.
In 1957, he appeared as the mystery guest on the CBS panel show I've Got a Secret. The panelists, all professional broadcasters, could not guess that the modest man in the chair had invented the medium they worked in. He was given $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes for his appearance.
He died in 1971, more or less forgotten outside a small circle of broadcast historians. The full posthumous recognition began in the 1990s. There is now a statue of him in the US Capitol's National Statuary Hall, representing the State of Utah. Aaron Sorkin's play The Farnsworth Invention opened on Broadway in 2007. The chemistry teacher's testimony is now a standard case study in patent law.
See the original
The full text and figures of US1773980 are on patents.us.
Related stories
Spencer Silver Invented an Adhesive No One Wanted for Twelve Years
In 1968, a 3M chemist named Spencer Silver was trying to make a stronger adhesive. He accidentally made a weaker one that didn't stick permanently. The product it eventually became — Post-it Notes — did not ship for another twelve years.
They Patented the Barcode and Sold It for Fifteen Thousand Dollars
In 1949, two graduate students at Drexel filed a patent for a 'classifying apparatus' that used printed concentric circles to identify items at a checkout counter. The patent expired in 1969 — five years before the first barcode was ever scanned in a grocery store.
Doug Engelbart Patented the Mouse and Made Ten Thousand Dollars
In 1967, Douglas Engelbart and William English filed a patent for a small wooden box on wheels with two metal disks underneath. The patent expired in 1987, just as the device was about to become the most-used input mechanism on Earth.
Tesla Built a Drone in 1898. The Navy Said No.
Nikola Tesla's 1898 patent describes a radio-controlled boat with multi-frequency channel hopping to defeat jamming. He demonstrated it at Madison Square Garden. The military passed. Drones would not become real for another century.