Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (31 page)

Terrific story. But, as it turned out, mostly false. Numerous operators worked that night (there’s some speculation that Sarnoff wasn’t even on duty), and Wanamaker was actually one of the stations temporarily shut down. Worst of all, about two weeks later, newspapers revealed that American Marconi had
withheld
names of the ship’s passengers to prolong the gripping account and boost its own publicity. And it worked. Even after the shameful ploy was exposed, the company’s stock and orders for their wireless services soared. (Ironically, Guglielmo Marconi himself considered traveling on the
Titanic
but decided to leave Europe a few days earlier and sailed instead on the British ocean liner
Lusitania
—the same ship that was sunk in May 1915 by a German U-boat.)

Sarnoff began his rapid climb up the corporate ladder in 1919, when he was brought on as commercial manager for the newly formed Radio Corporation of America. Within about ten years he was running the place. By then he realized that television, not just radio, was the future, and RCA its rightful progenitor.

“Up for some lunch?” Sergeant Mike calls to me from the feedlot. I’m standing out in the middle of the pasture, lost in thought.

“Sure,” I say, and walk over to his car, still thinking about how impossibly young Farnsworth was when his eureka moment struck. On our way into town, Mike and I pass several kids about Farnsworth’s age, reinforcing my incredulity that a gangly, intense teenager with very few resources had set in motion such a major revolution in technology. There’s a sense of heartbreak, too, in knowing what was in store for him.

Nothing had ever come easily to Farnsworth, but starting in the early 1930s, he and Pem were hit with a series of Job-like tragedies. They
struggled, like millions in the Great Depression, to keep their noses above water. When a second wave of bank failures swept the country after the initial stock market crash, Phil and Pem were left with only $1.57 to their name. (An unexpected reimbursement check carried them awhile, but there were few other guaranteed payments on the horizon.) Then in March 1932 their eighteen-month-old son, Kenny, developed strep throat. This was the era before penicillin and other antibiotics, and only an emergency tracheotomy could stop the infection from ravaging his lungs. After the operation, the attending intern who was supposed to be watching Kenny fell asleep and didn’t see Kenny’s breathing tube begin to clog up. When a restless Farnsworth checked in on his son, he found the boy suffocating to death. Doctors rushed into the room after hearing Farnsworth call for help, but there was nothing they could do. Phil and Pem watched helplessly as baby Kenny gasped uncontrollably and then passed away right before their eyes. Farnsworth’s business partners were so anxious about his company’s financial straits that they wouldn’t let him travel to Utah to bury his son. Pem went alone. Overwhelmed with grief and stress, the couple barely spoke to each other when she returned.

David Sarnoff, meanwhile, was thriving. One by one his competitors plunged into bankruptcy, and when Sarnoff was named president of RCA in 1930, he had nearly unfettered control over an entire media empire. Three years later, RCA opened its massive new headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with a sculpture of Prometheus erected out front signaling to the world that RCA, like the Greek god, would bring the fire of knowledge to mankind.

And bustling away in RCA’s massive lab in Camden, New Jersey, Vladimir Zworykin and his team were perfecting electronic television, with Zworykin maintaining all along that he had conceived of it well before Farnsworth.

Farnsworth wasn’t confrontational by nature, but on this matter he’d exhausted all patience and filed suit with the Patent Office to officially answer the question: Who invented electronic television, him or Zworykin?

RCA lawyers hit back with a two-pronged line of attack. First, they claimed Zworykin had patented a television-like device in 1923, making him the true inventor. Second, they insisted it was preposterous to believe that some kid with “only a grade school education” conceived in 1922 an innovation that had eluded “great men of science and skill” for years.

Honor, not just money, was at stake, and Farnsworth and his lawyer, Donald Lippincott, took particular umbrage at RCA’s accusation that Farnsworth’s teenage brainstorm in the potato field was pure fantasy. As tangible proof of Farnsworth’s veracity, Lippincott produced one Justin Tolman, in the flesh. By then Tolman was retired, but he well remembered his “brightest student” and had brought with him the aged but still legible piece of notebook paper containing Farnsworth’s original sketches from early 1922.

To vindicate Farnsworth’s claims, Lippincott had one more stellar witness—Vladimir Zworykin, who had said in Farnsworth’s Green Street lab that he wished he had invented the image dissector himself. Zworykin admitted to making the statement but claimed that he was just being polite. Lippincott scoffed at this, along with the notion that Zworykin’s 1923 patent resembled electronic television in any meaningful way.

The Patent Office’s ruling came in at almost fifty pages. Farnsworth began reading it line by line but eventually gave up, lost in the dense legalese, and skipped to the end. There, in the nine-word conclusion, was all he needed to see:
Priority of invention is awarded to Philo T. Farnsworth
.

“How many kids in Rigby do you think know who Farnsworth is?” I ask Sergeant Mike as we grab lunch at the deli in Broulim’s supermarket.

“Most of them have a general idea. They learn about him in school, and the local museum is named after him.”

I tell Mike that I’d recently been browsing through my old high school U.S. history textbook to see if Philo Farnsworth was mentioned. He wasn’t. Nor was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin (from the Civil
Rights Movement) or nineteen-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who discovered the Clovis archaeological site.

“It’s amazing when you think of how many young people have had an impact on history,” I say to Mike, “and yet in textbooks meant for the very same age group, they’re ignored.”

While we’re eating, one kid after another comes up to say hi to Mike. At first I think they’re wisely paying deference to the officer who might one day be pulling them over for speeding or some other infraction, but their affection seems genuine. A boy about sixteen or seventeen plunks down next to us and leans his head against Mike’s shoulder.

“How you holding up?” Mike asks.

“I’m all right,” he says, clearly not.

They talk for a few minutes, and after he leaves, Mike turns to me and says, “That poor kid. His brother was killed last week in a terrible accident.”

“Drunk driving?”

“No, he was climbing a metal fence at the baseball field when the top of his head hit a wire dangling from a light pole, and it electrocuted him.”

“Jesus.”

Another teenage boy walks by and, playing it cool, gives Mike a high five without stopping.

Mike and I get into a deeper conversation about history, and I learn that it’s a lifelong passion of his. When I ask why it matters to him, he surprises me by speaking of history in practical terms.

“I think the more that people, especially young people, know about where they live, the more pride and ownership they feel about the place, and the less likely they are to disrespect or vandalize it.”

“History as crime fighter,” I say. “I like that.”

And I think he’s right. Even though I’m only a tourist, I’ve become a little possessive about the towns I’ve visited after immersing myself in their past.

As far as anyone can determine, Phil Farnsworth himself never returned
to Rigby, Idaho. One calamity after another kept him scrambling just to stay solvent. A year after his patent win over RCA, he and Pem sailed to England to meet with the business partner most responsible for Farnsworth’s financial survival—John Logie Baird. Baird had given up on mechanical television, and he coordinated with the BBC to license Farnsworth’s electronic model for $50,000. Together, they would take on EMI/RCA, which was also hoping to dominate the European market, and they planned to showcase their superior system at London’s Crystal Palace exhibition in December 1936. (The architectural wonder was inspired by New York’s Crystal Palace, where Elisha Otis presented his safety elevator in 1854.) But Farnsworth was once again the victim of unbelievably bad luck: on November 30, 1936, the exhibit hall caught fire, reducing his high-tech cameras and monitors, all of them irreplaceable, to globs of melted plastic and glass. The BBC ended its agreement with Baird and Farnsworth and opted to partner with EMI/RCA instead.

RCA was moving aggressively back in the States, too. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, David Sarnoff “introduced” commercial television to the masses and went on to publicly crown himself the Father of Television. Despite securing a licensing arrangement with RCA in the aftermath of his lawsuit, Farnsworth knew that within a few years the deal would be irrelevant once his major patents expired and became fair use. The already high-strung inventor became so anxious that his doctor suggested he start smoking just to calm down.

Farnsworth did find some measure of solace whenever he returned to the old farmhouse in Brownfield, Maine, that he’d bought in 1938 and had spent long hours restoring. In October 1947, two days before he was scheduled to meet with his insurance agent to make certain the property was fully covered after all its renovations, the place burned down. “That’s enough,” Phil said to Pem while walking through the charred remains of his home and laboratory. “Let’s get out of here.”

They moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and then to Salt Lake City, where Brigham Young University gave Farnsworth an underground bunker lab to pursue his research in nuclear fusion. Crippling depression
and ailments plagued Farnsworth for the rest of his life, and he died of pneumonia on March 11, 1971. By the time of his death at age sixty-four, he’d been awarded three hundred U.S. and foreign patents that led to advances in electron microscopes, radar, peaceful uses of atomic energy, and air-traffic control.

Regarding his most famous invention, television, Farnsworth was decidedly mixed. When he was younger and idealistic, Pem later recalled, her husband believed it could be “a marvelous teacher” that allowed viewers “to see and learn about people in different lands.… Differences could be settled around conference tables, without going to war.” Later he referred to it more dismissively, saying that “there’s nothing on it worthwhile.” On this matter, Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin were in agreement. Zworykin was asked by an interviewer what he most liked about TV, and the elderly scientist responded in his thick Russian accent, “Da svitch, so I can turn the damn theenk off.”

Only once did Farnsworth appear on national television himself. In July 1957 he was the mystery guest—introduced as “Dr. X”—on CBS’s hit game show
I’ve Got a Secret
. Celebrity panelists asked him a series of questions to try to guess his identity as the inventor of electronic television.

Farnsworth went home victorious, having earned the top prize of $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes. He won, though, because none of the show’s famous panelists had a clue who he was.

WERNHER VON BRAUN
is often referred to as the father of America’s space program, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s official biography of von Braun praises him for being “without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history.” To his credit, von Braun redirected the spotlight onto the man he considered more worthy of such acclaim. “In the history of rocketry, Dr. Robert H. Goddard has no peers,” von Braun remarked.

Goddard was practically in knee pants himself when the idea for space flight came to him at his boyhood home at 1 Tallawanda Drive in Worcester, Massachusetts.