Have You Ever Heard of Philo T. Farnsworth?

Statues: The People They Salute

HAVE YOU EVER heard of Philo T. Farnsworth? ON THIS DAY September 7, in 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, inventor Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first image sent by electronic television.

The inventor and his small team of assistants placed a slide containing an image of a triangle in front of a machine Farnsworth called an Image Dissector. They then gathered around a receiving tube on the other side of a partition and watched. One line of the triangle appeared in a small bluish square of light on the receiver. At Farnsworth’s instructions, someone rotated the slide. As if by magic, the image of the line on the receiver turned as well. “That’s it, folks!” Farnsworth exclaimed. “We’ve done it! There you have electronic television!”

According to surviving relatives, Philo dreamed up his own idea for electronic-rather than mechanical-television while driving a horse-drawn harrow at the family’s new farm in Idaho. As he plowed a potato field in straight, parallel lines, he saw television in the furrows. He envisioned a system that would break an image into horizontal lines and reassemble those lines into a picture at the other end. Only electrons could capture, transmit and reproduce a clear moving figure. This eureka experience happened at the age of 14.

Here’s my Blog Post about Philo Farnsworth who was a subject of a statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection....

Philo Farnsworth was selected by the Utah Legislature in 1987 as the second statue to represent Utah in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol. At the time Utah was one of six states that had not yet selected two statues which are allowed for each state in the collection.

An elementary school principal in Utah had done some research and then presented 21 prominent Utahns to his students. The students along with 400 residents across Utah were surveyed to choose who they felt would best represent Utah in the Capitol Collection.

Philo Farnsworth, who made many crucial contributions to the early development of the all-electronic television, was selected. Then the lobbying of the Utah Legislature began and Philo was selected. In 1990, the statue of Philo Farnsworth was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol.

Recently, the Utah Legislature has decided to replace Philo Farnsworth with Martha Hughes Cannon, the first woman state senator in Utah. It seemed important to include Philo’s story before his departure from the collection.

According The National Inventors Hall of Fame, where Philo Farnsworth was inducted into in 1984, “his electronic inventions made possible today’s TV industry, the TV shots from the moon, and satellite pictures.”

Philo Farnsworth was born on August 19, 1906, in Beaver, Utah in a log cabin constructed by his grandfather, a Mormon pioneer. 12-year-old Philo, moved to Idaho with his family. The new home was wired for electricity, powered by a generator. Young Philo was drawn to the appliances and farm equipment powered by electricity and was always tinkering with the troublesome generator and items that the generator powered.

In 1923, the family moved back to Utah and Philo studied at Brigham Young University while still high school age. His father died in 1924, and Philo left school to help his family. He continued his electricity related experiments.

In 1926 he married Elma “Pem” Gardner and the couple moved to California, where Philo set up a lab to conduct his experiments. In 1927, Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory.

Throughout his life he developed many inventions and had attained more than 300 patents, foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, he ran into many legal problems with many of his patents. Large companies like RCA challenged him in court, and these challenges cost Philo both time and money. He did win the lawsuit against RCA and earned royalties, but never became wealthy.

Farnsworth is called “the father of television” for his invention of an early electronic television system, which he first visualized when he was in high school. He died on March 11, 1971, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In a 1996, Philo’s wife recounted Philo’s change of heart about the value of television in an interview. She recalled his feelings after seeing how his invention showed a man walking on the moon, in real time, to millions of viewers:

Interviewer: The image dissector was used to send shots back from the moon to earth.

Elma Farnsworth: Right.

Interviewer: What did Phil think of that?

Elma Farnsworth: We were watching it, and, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Phil turned to me and said, “Pem, this has made it all worthwhile.”

Before then, he wasn’t too sure.

Diana Erbio is a freelance writer and author of “Coming to America: A Girl Struggles to Find her Way in a New World”. Read more in her series Statues: The People They Salute, by going to the Table of Contents for links to her posts about statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection and others. Visit & Like the Facebook Page.

Pictured is Statue of Philo T. Farnsworth at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco.