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By Kent Larsen
What Farnsworth on the Web Reveals
NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Well-informed Mormons know that a 14-year-old Idaho
farm boy, Philo T. Farnsworth, invented television. But a New York Times
look at the history of television through the web shows that not everyone
agrees, and that the story may be far more complex than it appears.
Supporters of Farnsworth make their case in several places, including the
Farnsworth Chronicles
http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles , Paul W. Schatzkin's biography that draws in part on
Farnsworth's widow and eldest son for its material. Farnsworth's story has
also been told in many books and other literary sources, including some
Mormon sources, such as BYU professor Eric Samuelson's play, "A Love Affair
with Electrons," presented last year at BYU.
But Farnsworth's detractors make their case for the villan of Farnswroth's
story, David Sarnoff, who's company, RCA, ended up controlling the initial
television patents. Sarnoff's story is told in a Technology Review article
by Evan I. Schwartz that compares Sarnoff to Microsoft's Bill Gates. (See
http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct00/schwartz.htm .)
But the New York Times' Michael Pollack prefers a more balanced and complex
view of the history, found at the website for the Sarnoff Corporation http://www.sarnoff.com , the successor to
RCA Laboratories. Sarnoff's Alex Magoun disagrees with both positions,
saying, "As with other histories of technologies of the 20th century,
television suffers from the first run of corporate
promotions and claims, and then the equally one-sided, anti-corporate
revisions offered by supporters and descendants of those neglected in those
histories."
Magoun, who as the curator for the corporation and director of the David
Sarnoff Library is expanding the company's web-based information about
television into a new site that will be available at http://www.davidsarnoff.org in a few
months, says that Farnsworth was well paid for his contribution (his family
claims all he got was "a carton of Winstons, $80 cash, and Garry Moore's
eternal gratitude."). He also says that the more important question might be
"Who Innovated Television." The answer, says Magoun, isn't any one individual.
Source:
Inside the Soap Opera of Television's Early Days
New York Times pg8 18Jan01 I2
By Michael Pollack
Several biographies of Philo T. Farnsworth are available through Amazon.com:
"Distant Vision : Romance and Discovery of an Invisible Frontier" by Elma G. Farnsworth, widow of Philo T. Farnsworth
"TV's Forgotten Hero : The Story of Philo Farnsworth" by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson, a juvenile book which is aimed at ages 9-12.
"The Story of Television; The Life of Philo T. Farnsworth" by George Everson, a 1974 biography published just a few years after Farnsworth died in 1971.
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