Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971) was an American inventor who was granted the first patent for the television by the United States government. He also invented a video camera tube and the image dissector. He sold a fully functioning television system—complete with receiver and camera—which he produced commercially through the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation from 1938 to 1951, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In later life, Farnsworth invented a small nuclear fusion device, the Farnsworth Fusor, employing inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC). Like many fusion devices, it was not a practical device for generating nuclear power, although it provides a viable source of neutrons. The design of this device has been the inspiration for other fusion approaches, including the Polywell reactor concept. Farnsworth held 300 patents, mostly in radio and television.
Farnsworth was born August 19, 1906, the eldest of five children of Lewis Edwin Farnsworth and Serena Amanda Bastian, a Latter-day Saint couple living in a small log cabin built by Lewis's father in Manderfield, near Beaver, Utah. His maternal grandfather, Jacob Bastian, was a Mormon immigrant from Denmark. In 1918, the family moved to a relative's 240-acre (1.0 km2) ranch near Rigby, Idaho, where his father supplemented his farming income by hauling freight with his horse-drawn wagon. Philo was excited to find that his new home was wired for electricity, with a Delco generator providing power for lighting and farm machinery. He was a quick student in mechanical and electrical technology, repairing the troublesome generator. He found a burned-out electric motor among some items discarded by the previous tenants and rewound the armature; he converted his mother's hand-powered washing machine into an electric-powered one. He developed an early interest in electronics after his first telephone conversation with a distant relative, and he discovered a large cache of technology magazines in the attic of their new home. He won $25 in a pulp-magazine contest for inventing a magnetized car lock. Farnsworth was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Farnsworth excelled in chemistry and physics at Rigby High School. He asked science teacher Justin Tolman for advice about an electronic television system that he was contemplating; he provided the teacher with sketches and diagrams covering several blackboards to show how it might be accomplished electronically, and Tolman encouraged him to develop his ideas.
One of the drawings that he did on a blackboard for his chemistry teacher was recalled and reproduced for a patent interference case between Farnsworth and RCA.
In 1923, the family moved to Provo, Utah, and Farnsworth attended Brigham Young High School that fall. His father died of pneumonia in January 1924 at age 58, and Farnsworth assumed responsibility for sustaining the family while finishing high school. After graduating BYHS in June 1924, he applied to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he earned the nation's second-highest score on academy recruiting tests. However, he was already thinking ahead to his television projects; he learned that the government would own his patents if he stayed in the military, so he obtained an honorable discharge within months of joining under a provision in which the eldest child in a fatherless family could be excused from military service to provide for his family. He returned to Provo and enrolled at Brigham Young University, but he was not allowed by the faculty to attend their advanced science classes. He attended anyway and made use of the university's research labs, and he earned a Junior Radio-Trician certification from the National Radio Institute, and full certification in 1925. While attending college, he met Provo High School student Elma "Pem" Gardner (1908–2006), whom he eventually married.
Farnsworth worked while his sister Agnes took charge of the family home and the second-floor boarding house, with the help of a cousin living with the family. The Farnsworths later moved into half of a duplex, with family friends the Gardners moving into the other side when it became vacant. He developed a close friendship with Pem's brother Cliff Gardner, who shared his interest in electronics, and the two moved to Salt Lake City to start a radio repair business. The business failed, and Gardner returned to Provo.
Farnsworth remained in Salt Lake City and became acquainted with Leslie Gorrell and George Everson, a pair of San Francisco philanthropists who were then conducting a Salt Lake City Community Chest fund-raising campaign. They agreed to fund his early television research with an initial $6,000 in backing, and set up a laboratory in Los Angeles for Farnsworth to carry out his experiments.
Farnsworth married Pem on May 27, 1926, and the two traveled to Berkeley, California, in a Pullman coach. They rented a house at 2910 Derby Street, from which he applied for his first television patent, which was granted on August 26, 1930. By that time they had moved across the bay to San Francisco, where Farnsworth set up his new lab at 202 Green Street.
A few months after arriving in California, Farnsworth was prepared to show his models and drawings to a patent attorney who was nationally recognized as an authority on electrophysics. Everson and Gorrell agreed that Farnsworth should apply for patents for his designs, a decision that proved crucial in later disputes with RCA. Most television systems in use at the time used image scanning devices ("rasterizers") employing rotating "Nipkow disks" comprising a spinning disk with holes arranged in spiral patterns such that they swept across an image in a succession of short arcs while focusing the light they captured on photosensitive elements, thus producing a varying electrical signal corresponding to the variations in light intensity. Farnsworth recognized the limitations of the mechanical systems, and that an all-electronic scanning system could produce a superior image for transmission to a receiving device.
On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. Pem Farnsworth recalled in 1984 that her husband broke the stunned silence of his lab assistants by saying, "There you are – electronic television!" The source of the image was a glass slide, backlit by an arc lamp. An extremely bright source was required because of the low light sensitivity of the design. By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. His backers had demanded to know when they would see dollars from the invention; so the first image shown was, appropriately, a dollar sign. In 1929, the design was further improved by elimination of a motor-generator, which meant the television system now had no mechanical parts. During the same year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a 3.5 in (89 mm) image of his wife Elma ("Pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required).
Many inventors had built electromechanical television systems before Farnsworth's seminal contribution, but Farnsworth designed and built the world's first working all-electronic television system, employing electronic scanning in both the pickup and display devices. He first demonstrated his system to the press on September 3, 1928, and to the public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on August 25, 1934.
In 1930, RCA recruited Vladimir K. Zworykin—who had tried, unsuccessfully, to develop his own all-electronic television system at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh since 1923—to lead its television development department. Before leaving his old employer, Zworykin visited Farnsworth's laboratory, and was sufficiently impressed with the performance of the Image Dissector that he reportedly had his team at Westinghouse make several copies of the device for experimentation. Zworykin later abandoned research on the Image Dissector, which at the time required extremely bright illumination of its subjects, and turned his attention to what became the Iconoscope. In a 1970s series of videotaped interviews, Zworykin recalled that, "Farnsworth was closer to this thing you're using now [i.e., a video camera] than anybody, because he used the cathode-ray tube for transmission. But, Farnsworth didn't have the mosaic [of discrete light elements], he didn't have storage. Therefore, [picture] definition was very low.... But he was very proud, and he stuck to his method." Contrary to Zworykin's statement, Farnsworth's patent number 2,087,683 for the Image Dissector (filed April 26, 1933) features the "charge storage plate" invented by Tihanyi in 1928 and a "low velocity" method of electron scanning, also describes "discrete particles" whose "potential" is manipulated and "saturated" to varying degrees depending on their velocity. Farnsworth's patent numbers 2,140,695 and 2,233,888 are for a "charge storage dissector" and "charge storage amplifier," respectively.