Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Philo T. Farnsworth!

Farnsworth is not particularly remembered today, but he should be. Why? Because that picture up there, of the TV, he's responsible for it.

The TV, I mean. Not the picture.

What I'm trying to say is: Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television as we know it. As in, you know, came up with it.

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, it wasn't quite so cool for Philo, who eventually came to regard the TV as a monster that wasted people's lives (also known as "having fun"). Philo so despised television programming he wouldn't even have one in his house.

Oh, and he died essentially penniless. And is forgotten.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born in 1906 near Beaver City (in what we can only hope is called Coochie County) Utah. The town had been founded in 1859 by Farnsworth's grandfather on the orders of some person called Brigham Young. I believe they founded a University named after him or something.

When Philo was 12, his family moved to a ranch in Idaho four miles from the nearest school (this seemed a lot farther when even if you had a car -- which the Farnsworth's didn't -- it looked like this). A huge nerd, Philo was fascinated by electrons and electricity, and asked to take extra courses at the school in technology.

Well, that electronic stuff just made sense to ol' Philo. Watching a field being plowed when he was 14, Farnsworth dreamed up the the cold cathode ray tube, a device still in use in many TV's today.

You and I see a corn field. Farnsworth saw television.

Not unlike Doc Brown (who has a hilariously long Wikipedia entry), it took a few years (in this case, seven) before Philo had the money to build one.

Once he built it, he gave it a terrible name: the "Image Dissector." Televisions at the time used mechanical scanning devices known as "Nipkow discs" which were combined with photoelectric cells. Farnsworth's Image Dissector was completely electrical, and by 1929, two years after debuting it, he was making the best TVs on the planet.

Oh, and he was just 23.

Things probably would have ended pretty well for ol' Philo if it hadn't been for a man named David Sarnoff, the head of RCA at the time. Sensing the potential of television, he sent his chief engineer, Vladamir Zworykin, to take a tour of Philo's laboratory.

Impressed by what he saw, Zworykin cheerfully copied Philo's advancements and combined them with a design of his own called the Iconoscope.

Then, as you can probably guess, all hell broke loose.

I won't bore you with the boring details (since I have read them and can confirm they are indeed boring), but it took until 1935 before Farnsworth was awarded "priority of invention" for the electrical TV. Sarnoff and RCA appealed, but were eventually forced to pay Farnsworth $1 million in royalties.

But not for long. The patents for Farnsworth's major advancements expired shortly after WWII (when sales of TVs had been suspended). As soon as they did, RCA took control of the television business, and with a energetic public relations campaign, promoted Sarnoff and Zworykin as the "fathers of television."

Things kind of went downhill from there. Farnsworth began drinking. He suffered from depression. In 1947, his house burned down.

But he kept on inventing. By the time of his death, he held more than 300 patents, helping to create radar, infra-red night vison, air-traffic control systems, the electron microscope, baby incubators, and the astronomical telescope.

Oh, and he invented a process for nuclear fusion. But development went slowly, and when investors started cashing in their loans, Farnsworth went broke and died shortly after of pneumonia at the age of 64.

So there he was, one of God's own prototypes, and I think it's past time we celebrate Philo T. Farnsworth for giving us the opportunity to waste so much time. What would any of us do without him?

Oh, that's right.