Who Is Philo Farnsworth
 

Any one catch Jeopardy on Friday? Mark Cuban gave a video answer (I can't quite recall exactly what it was exactly) and I immediately yelled at the screen "WHO IS PHILO FARNSWORTH"! I quickly realized that none of the contestants were going to answer. Sadly game show history is no better for Philo in 2013 than it was in 1957.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86jExgzinDQ

Farnsworth's lab building in San Francisco is a cool place of pilgrimage for old TV buffs. An easy walk from Fisherman's Wharf.

http://www.noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp

http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist10/philo.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-hs_0oSDxY
Watch this if you never saw it before. It's facinating.

My wife and I walked from Coit Tower to his lab location which looked easy on Google Maps, but was definitely not even a little bit easy. One of the building's tenants does video editing.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8092/8...48040b43_c.jpg

Somewhere I just read that US patent for television was later registered in 1930, was this the same as Philo's?

For anyone wishing to read more, a PDF of his life is archived here:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/s...00everrich.pdf

From what I've read, & been able to "Read between the lines", Farnsworth was a likable chap, pretty unassuming...Even Gen Sarnoff, who usually held competitors/rivals in low regard, apparently liked the affable Farnsworth...

I was also watching Jeopardy. They said he was from Utah, but he was only born there. He moved to Idaho as a child and he invented electronic TV when he lived in Idaho. For the sake of television history, he's an Idahoan.

Some day I'll make a pilgrimage to the Farnsworth et. al. museum in Rigby, Idaho.

That was one of the most interesting documentaries I have seen.

Thanks

Carl

RCA's Sarnoff was a tough ruthless CEO - but he kept RCA/NBC in the front.
Subsequent CEO's were not as capable and ran the company in the ground.

Carl

I was watching Jeopardy, too, and screaming the answer.

There is no such thing as "the" patent for TV. There are certain significant ones.

And Philo didn't "invent" electronic TV. He was one of several people who added significantly to its development.

Here is what I consider a balanced look at the question of who made the first working electronic camera:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/who_was_first.html

It seems like a bit of a stretch, an embellishment by historians perhaps, that the line-by-line scanning idea came from watching plowed rows of furrows. Line-by-line scanning (or "rastering") was already being done mechanically by flying-spot (spinning disc) scanners. Young Philo's epiphany, if there was one, had to be on doing the flying-spot thingy with an electron beam

I think why I have been fascintated with radio and TV all my life is the incredible ammount of combined brian-power, money, and efforts of so many people to bring it to being. It was/is a true miracle come true!

Hi All;
The only thing is that Maybe, I don't know for sure, From what I see in the video's is -- All He has was some old magazines, and He didn't know (at that time) about what others were doing, like Baird.. He at this time didn't know alot of what was going on in the world outside his farming community.. And I don't know and the videos don't say how old the magazines were, so there might, but there might not be anything about Mechanical TV.. I think it was a few years later, that He found out about Mechanical TV and as the video says He dismissed it, for electronic scanning.. About the Time He showed it to His Hight School Teacher and few years would have passed since his origional Idea.. And even if He did know about it, He still had to work out all of the electronics.. How many of Us can Take either a CRT or a Vidicon and make all the coils for it and the circuits for those coils.. I know and have read and seen about doing that, and would like to try it, But Even for my 10BP4 making my own Vertical and Horizontal and Focusing Coils would be difficult for me.. Even though I most likely have the wire to do so..
THANK YOU Marty

The story about the plowing has to be PR. Every radio magazine of the time had stories about Baird, including how he used a disk to accomplish scanning. Philo had to be aware of Baird's method.

It is unlikely that he was the first to understand that the same technique could be applied to a cathode ray tube, since CRTs had been around for some time.

There was one thing particularly intriguing in Farnsworth's 1957 'I've Got a Secret' dissertation. That was his foresight into improving bandwidth usage by "storing" unchanging/nonmoving parts of the picture by yet-to-be-invented compression technology.

Well spoken!