ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 4, 1961, READERS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES came across the face of Philo T. Farnsworth on the front page of their newspapers. “Encouraging promise of a low-cost nuclear fusion process was reported here yesterday by the International Telephone and Telegraph Company,” the story announced. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also working on the problem, the story added, and it had spent $32 million on the project in 1960 alone. The government commission, however, was trying to control the the reaction using magnetic fields, whereas Farnsworth aimed to confine fusion using an electrostatic process. The news report sent ITT stock soaring, and Farnsworth was immediately given a big raise, a promotion, an upgraded lab facility, and an award of stock options.
In the context of the times, Farnsworth’s goal wasn’t that far-fetched. In his famous television speech of March 1961, President Kennedy took on the challenge of landing an American on the moon by the end of the decade. Which project was more fanciful—putting a man on the moon or controlling fusion? At the time, no one could really tell.
By the mid-1960s, Farnsworth was predicting that his invention, which he called the Fusor, was going to replace all known forms of energy. The Fusor would end pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, eliminate the hazards of nuclear waste, allow for the building of cars that wear out before their power packs run empty, and reduce electricity costs to the point that one could power New York City for a dollar per month. His ultimate dream was the fusion-powered spaceship that could fly to Mars with a palm-sized fuel container. His visions were beginning to echo Hugo Gernsback’s long-ago predictions.
For Farnsworth, the fusion project was following a similar pattern to his early television efforts, the work of the gray old man mirroring that of the young rebel: he discovered a unconventional approach to a daunting problem, worked out a theory, built a machine, and pushed toward achieving a breakthrough. He filed for patents on his Fusor device, and two of them were issued. He even had a new adversary. In his view, the AEC had become the new RCA, ready to co-opt his idea when it proved viable. Yet this time, Farnsworth may have come up against a wall of impossibility, as a sustained reaction of this type has yet to be achieved. ITT cut off funding for the project in 1966 and put the ailing inventor on medical retirement at age sixty.
Yet he still wouldn’t give it up. Phil and Pem sold their home in Fort Wayne and moved back to Utah. They were now living close to the spot where they had first met. They bought a ranch house near Salt Lake City, and Farnsworth kept up his fusion research. He set up a new lab not far from his home and hired old colleagues, but lack of progress only made Farnsworth deeply depressed once again, and the expense of running the lab had consumed all of his money and put the family deep into debt. His health went into free fall, and he seemed to lose the will to live any longer.
On July 20, 1969, Farnsworth’s television legacy was brought into sharp relief. After the Apollo 11 came in for its landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and unhitched a latch that released a television camera, a device based on a miniaturized version of a Farnsworth Image Dissector tube that ITT had provided to NASA. The entire project would not have been undertaken if television didn’t exist, as the enormous cost could be justified only if the lunar landing was both a scientific mission and an experience that the rest of humanity could share. Along with 1 billion people worldwide, Philo T. Farnsworth watched in wonder as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to take steps on soil beyond their own planet. As Farnsworth listened to Armstrong’s famous “giant leap for mankind” declaration, tears welled up in his eyes. “This,” he told Pem, “has made it all worthwhile.”
Philo Taylor Farnsworth died on March 11, 1971, at the age of sixty-four, isolated from the business world and scientific community and all but totally forgotten. He was buried in Provo, Utah, at a small ceremony of family and friends.
Just nine months later, on December 12, 1971, David Sarnoff died in his sleep at the age of eighty. His wealth was modest by modern standards, with RCA stock worth about $8 million and other assets valued in the single-digit millions, but he was honored beyond compare, with twenty-seven honorary university degrees and more than 100 awards, medals, and citations, many of which he actively sought late in life. His passing was announced on NBC’s Meet the Press the following morning, and a half-hour special program commemorating the network’s founder aired in the afternoon. Three days later, at a funeral service inside New York’s majestic Temple Emanu-El that was attended by scores of luminaries, Governor Nelson Rockefeller eulogized David Sarnoff’s “life of greatness.”
Not long before his death, Sarnoff had turned control of the corporation over to his son Robert, who had progressed through the ranks as a capable leader of NBC. Bobby Sarnoff was widely blamed for squandering the greatness of the parent company, turning the electronics and communications leader into a conglomeration of mismatched units by acquiring companies in businesses ranging from car rentals to book publishing to frozen foods to real estate to carpeting. The board fired Bobby Sarnoff, but it didn’t stop the company’s decline and loss of focus, as RCA then bought finance, insurance, and greeting card companies. By now, ultra-efficient Japanese manufacturers had all but completely taken over the business of making televisions.
In perhaps the most ironic corporate transaction of all time, the General Electric Company purchased RCA in 1986, nearly fifty-five years after it had been forced by the government to divest the radio monopoly. Following completion of the $6.3-billion deal, GE proceeded to break apart David Sarnoff’s old empire and auction off all the pieces, save for NBC. Sarnoff’s prized RCA Laboratories—since renamed Sarnoff Corporation—had lost most of its luster by then, and it was sold for the sum of one dollar to the nonprofit Stanford Research Institute. Sarnoff would have fought the GE takeover from the outset, said many of those who had known him, and he would have been horrified by the dismemberment of the corporation.
As similar acquisitions followed—ABC was bought by the Walt Disney Company, while CBS was acquired by Westinghouse, which later sold itself to media conglomerate Viacom—television was coming to be treated less like a technology and more like a corporate asset and a marketing machine. Television advertising has mushroomed into a $50-billion industry in the United States alone, surpassing newspapers as the nation’s number one marketing medium. According to Nielsen data, the average American watches more than four hours every day, with the rest of the world not far behind, making television humankind’s dominant leisure “activity” and its window to a world that has become a house of mirrors. Yet there is no getting around the fact that television is also an invention, perhaps the single most successful technological creation in history when judged purely by the speed of its mass acceptance, and at its heart, it is still just a glass tube in which electrons paint images on a screen line by line, just as the teenage Philo T. Farnsworth had envisioned it while plowing a potato field all those years ago.
Recognition has been slow in coming Farnsworth’s way. “As to who was the inventor of electronic television,” said Donald Glenn Fink, the engineer who in 1941 devised the enduring NTSC format, “I think Farnsworth should clearly be given the credit, and I’m not sure that he does get it.”
In 1973, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office dedicated a National Inventors Hall of Fame, an institution now located in Akron, Ohio. Among the first inductees were Edison, Bell, Morse, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin was inducted in 1977, five years before his death. In 1984, after the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps honoring forgotten inventors, including Farnsworth, Edwin Howard Armstrong and Nikola Tesla, the Hall of Fame finally inducted Philo T. Farnsworth as its seventy-seventh member. In 1981, the state of California named Farnsworth’s Green Street laboratory an official historic landmark, commemorating the location with a special plaque.
As the fiftieth anniversary of David Sarnoff’s introduction of television at the 1939 World’s Fair approached, a group of elementary school students in Utah did some research into the history of television, and they grew determined to come up with a way to recognize Farnsworth. They noticed that each state is entitled to be represented by statues of two figures in National Statuary Hall, in the U.S. Capitol. Utah at the time had only one: Brigham Young, who founded the state. The students successfully petitioned the U.S. Congress to install a statue of Farnsworth, and the sculpture was created and unveiled at a 1990 ceremony attended by Pem Farnsworth and her three sons. The bronze Philo T. Farnsworth stands there today, gazing down at a tube in his hands. Under his name on the figure’s base are the words Father of Television.