THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PHILO T. FARNSWORTH WAS CONSIDERED the perfect picture of pure inventive brilliance. On September 3, 1928, a photograph of him appeared on the business page of the San Francisco Chronicle, alongside bold type hailing the “young genius” who was “quietly working away in his San Francisco laboratory” on his “revolutionary light machine.” Just twenty-two years old, he had recently grown a mustache to mask his youth. His unsmiling expression barely hinted at his inner exhilaration, and his eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the lens of the camera, as if to deflect attention away from himself and toward the two tubes he was holding in his hands. The article described these quart jar–sized devices as the first all-electronic “sending and receiving tubes of his new television set,” a system that transmits “twenty pictures per second,” each frame containing “8,000 elements, or pinpoints of light, to insure detail.”
The night the story was published, Farnsworth was driving down Market Street in an open-air roadster, heading back home from an evening at the movies. His twenty-year-old wife was riding next to him, and another couple sat in the backseat. When the foursome heard a newsboy shouting the headlines from the next morning’s paper, Farnsworth pulled up to the curb and took a coin from his pocket. As he unfolded a copy, he was startled by the grainy image of himself. His wife attempted to read the story aloud as he continued driving, but the other two passengers were hooting and hollering, trying to grab the paper out of her hands and get a better look at the picture.
As usual, Farnsworth had trouble falling asleep after he and his wife arrived back at their apartment in a row house on Vallejo Street, itself just a short walk from Farnsworth’s laboratory, a creaky loft over a garage on Green Street, at the base of Telegraph Hill, which provided a view of the San Francisco Bay. Overworked, rail thin, and beset with chronic insomnia, the inventor had bright blue eyes that were encircled by shadows of exhaustion. His shock of thick, sandy brown hair was finger-combed straight back atop a large rotunda of a forehead that was out of proportion to his slight build. He lived in a perpetual state of low-level anxiety that made his whole body seem to vibrate.
By now, Farnsworth’s youthful determination had grown into a relentless obsession. Even when he did manage to get some rest, he would usually assign himself a technical quandary beforehand, then work it out in a dream state, often arising to scribble down notes in the darkness. He was convinced that television would wipe out ignorance and misunderstanding, and his resolve to get people to watch television was just as great as his will to create it in the first place.
When Farnsworth was a boy, the legends of Edison, Bell, Morse, the Wright Brothers, and other individuals with singularly brilliant ideas burned brightly, and he set out to be a lone inventor who could transform the world just like them. He was fourteen, just a farm boy in Idaho, when he memorized Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize–winning photoelectric theory and perused piles of radio industry magazines, resulting in a growing belief that he would be the one to invent television. He was fifteen when he disclosed a simple but remarkably workable sketch of his idea to his high school science teacher, nineteen when he raised his first seed money to start building his system, twenty when he applied for his two basic patents, one for the electronic television camera and one for a compatible reception set. Now, his secret was finally unleashed, as the Chronicle story was picked up by newswires and reprinted in dozens of newspapers around the world.
Among the people most interested in reading the article was David Sarnoff. Sitting at his glass-top desk at RCA headquarters, high up in New York City’s towering Woolworth Building, Sarnoff spent much of the day reviewing and responding to press clippings, reports, and memoranda. The founder of the NBC broadcasting network, Sarnoff had recently been named acting president of NBC’s parent company, the Radio Corporation of America, as the actual president had taken a leave of absence to work full time on Herbert Hoover’s 1928 run for the White House.
Sarnoff used the opportunity to solidify his reputation as the Babe Ruth of broadcasting. Drawing a salary equal to that of the Yankee right fielder, and with a belly to match, Sarnoff wore three-piece suits that were so finely tailored that one didn’t notice his girth. He was thirty-seven years old and his dark hair was just beginning to gray and recede. He usually carried with him nothing more than an oak walking stick, while his minions scrambled to summon his chauffeurs, make his reservations, pay his tabs, open his doors, carry his coats, pull out his chairs, hand him his memos, and light his cigars.
To Sarnoff, it must have seemed far-fetched that some kid from California, working independently, would be anywhere near getting so complex an invention to a commercial stage. Still, Sarnoff was worried about the television situation in general, and he was especially concerned that a breakthrough in visual broadcasting would disrupt the market for radio. Under Sarnoff, RCA was the most aggressive corporation in the world when it came to hiring the best scientists and engineers, buying out their patent rights, and controlling the terms of the licensing to the rest of the industry. Legally, no one could build a radio without a license from RCA, and no radio could be sold without a royalty flowing back to the company. Thanks largely to this arrangement, shares in RCA became the single hottest stock in the wildly euphoric market of the late 1920s. RCA’s fiercely competitive radio monopoly also drew steady fire from members of Congress and the U.S. Justice Department.
After reading the article about Farnsworth, Sarnoff wasted little time in launching a public relations offensive. He crafted a detailed essay on the state of television, stressing two points: that the new technology is nowhere near ready for the public, and when it is, RCA will be the leader in bringing it to market. The article, entitled “Forging an Electric Eye to Scan the World,” was published under Sarnoff’s own byline, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, on November 18, 1928, shortly after Hoover’s convincing Election Day victory. “It would be easy, and it might be profitable, to cry ‘Television is here,’ and to provide crude receiving equipment for the will-’o-the wisps of the air,” Sarnoff wrote, “but it would not advance the day when sight is added to sound in an adequate service to the home through the medium of radio communication.”
A month later, Sarnoff struck again. “Leaders Dispel Television Fears,” said a Times headline on December 16. Quoting David Sarnoff as the main source, the article assured readers that the latest-model radio sets won’t be obsolete any time soon and that they are definitely not threatened by the revolutionary new creation of an unnamed inventor. “Make it a radio Christmas,” the story said. “Just think of all the radio entertainment you will miss during 1929 if you keep your house and family out of tune with the ether.”
Philo T. Farnsworth didn’t fully realize that the process of invention itself was being transformed. Innovation became too important and too lucrative to be left in the hands of unpredictable, independent individuals. The giant corporations that had sprung up around all the new technologies of the past century wanted to control the future and avoid surprises that could topple their empires, and they were growing more and more frustrated over negotiating for patent rights with outside inventors.
They decided to take on the task themselves, and in the first two decades of the new century began launching corporate research laboratories. Enterprises such as General Electric, DuPont, Eastman Kodak and AT&T set up labs employing large groups of scientists and engineers who gave up their independence—and their patent rights—in return for steady salaries. By now, there were hundreds of such labs, and the new RCA Laboratories was about to take its place among the most prestigious. As a result, technological change would become less disruptive and more methodical, so as to give the corporations themselves far greater control over the mass marketing of all the new gadgets and gizmos that would roll out of their laboratories.
By the time Thomas Edison died three years later, the age of the great lone inventor had seemed to come to a halt. Edison had still been working on his own and had continued filing for patents through his final years. When he passed away on October 18, 1931, at age eighty-four, tributes rushed in from the leaders of the world while his body lay in state in his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory. Edison’s obituary in the New York Times said the following:
No figure so completely satisfied the popular conception of what an inventor should be. Here was a solitary genius revolutionizing the world and making an invisible force do his bidding—a genius that conquered conservatism, garlanded cities in light, and created wonders that transcended the predictions of Utopian poets. . . With him passes perhaps the last of the heroic inventors and the greatest of the line. The future probably belongs to the corporation research laboratory, with trained engineers and chemists directed by a scientific captain. Edison saw the change coming. Yet he must have realized that the electrical forces he had unleashed were too formidable for even a lone Titan to master.
Farnsworth was so certain that Edison would not be the last of the line that he took it upon himself to master the forces of invention that individuals such as Edison let loose. In doing so, he wholly underestimated what he was up against. But just as Farnsworth miscalculated the power of corporate-controlled innovation, David Sarnoff underestimated Farnsworth, who would ultimately consume more of Sarnoff’s own time and resources than even the looming government antitrust action against RCA. Whereas Farnsworth viewed Sarnoff as a gigantic but surmountable obstacle, Sarnoff viewed Farnsworth as just one more inventor to be held under his thumb. Buy him out cheap and reap the rewards. He didn’t realize that Farnsworth was different from all the other scientists and engineers he controlled, that this inventor was a throwback to an earlier era.
Both men were bursting with such abundant self-confidence that neither could conceive of defeat. They imposed their talents and their wills, their hopes and their fears, and even the quirks of their personalities on this invention. Out of the confrontation between these two mismatched men, the modern television tube would emerge, ingesting images of reality deep inside itself, then spitting out reordered flickers of phosphorescence into living rooms everywhere. By the time the inventor and the mogul would die, in the very same year, the number of homes on Earth with televisions would surpass the number of homes with indoor plumbing. Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff were fighting over something more than just a box of lights and wires.