Now Playing on TV of Tomorrow

Hear executive director Alex Magoun speak on the history of television, interactive TV in historical perspective, David Sarnoff, and The Farnsworth Invention on Tracy Swedlow's TV of Tomorrow internet radio show! Tracy is the founder and editor of Interactive TV Today, which has covered the business of interactive television for ten years. She met Alex at the Early TV Foundation convention in Hilliard, Ohio, several years ago and followed up with this hour-long interview because of the publication of Alex's book, Television: The Life Story of a Technology, which discusses interactive TV and internet video in the final chapter.

Farewell to The Farnsworth Invention?

Aaron Sorkin's Broadway play The Farnsworth Invention closed last weekend after a three-month run at the The Music Box Theatre. According to Variety, its box office suffered from the strike last fall that began on opening night, and competition from a number of other non-musical productions. Thanks to the gift of Library friend George Cody, I had the opportunity to see it before it closed, and offer these thoughts as a reflection on the power of fact and fiction to make us think about the people and ideals behind our material world.

Having spoken with Sorkin's assistant at length, provided David Sarnoff actor Hank Azaria with a bibliography, read the script, and read and heard a great many reviews, I took my seat with some trepidation. Yet there on the scrim concealing the stage were projections of Philo Farnsworth's patent and notes for his image dissector. How odd is that for a theatre district that lives on musical spectaculars? When the play opens, there's the smartly dressed Sarnoff as characterized by Sorkin and Azaria--direct, aggressive, idealistic--introducing the subject, the invention of television, and the protagonist, Farnsworth, as a schoolboy in rural Idaho.

And off we go, from an untutored genius in a remote one-room schoolhouse to Sarnoff's escape from Russian pogroms to his perceptive understanding of the power of radio broadcasting and the rise of RCA in the 1920s. While Farnsworth pluckily cobbles together a team of family members to help him demonstrate the first public electronic TV transmission (Vladimir Zworykin made an internal demo of his electronic system in 1925), Sarnoff engineers RCA's growth into a multimedia empire, only to see it collapse in the speculative Crash of '29. This certainly resonated with an audience all too aware of reverberations of the bursting subprime bubble.

My concerns turned to from relief to pleasure and then joy as I watched the cast recreate the spirit of creativity, wonder, competition, and disillusionment in high technology. Sorkin, director Des McAnuff, and the rest of the ensemble created an alternate universe in which they realized a Sarnoff different in shape and manner from the one that I and the Sarnoff family and older RCA staff know. But not in his essence: there they’ve caught and manifested David’s understanding of the power and possibility of communications, a conviction he maintained from the questionable quality of radio programs to the televised riots and warfare of the 1960s—because he knew we have no choice. Some may feel that the final scene doesn't fit: a bar whose patrons are riveted by the televised moon landing (how the camera beat the lander to the surface requires some suspension of disbelief). But it caps the story with the ideal use that Sarnoff and Farnsworth hoped for "their" invention: the sight of the moon's vast wasteland justifies the landscape broadcast by the commercial networks.

The flaws with the play are not in Sorkin's mash-up of history and fiction, or the amount of information he pours out through his narrators and characters. They appear in the effort to make a tragedy out of a conflict between an inventor and an innovator. There are lots of brilliant inventors, but many of their inventions or patents never make it to the factory or the consumer, because of technical drawbacks, someone's else better idea, the lack of entrepreneurial support, the wrong market, or the wrong cultural moment for the right market. There are arguably fewer brilliant entrepreneurs, who have a vision, a place for particular inventions and products within that vision, and a sense of what the right market will bear. And here, that innovator is a force of nature few of us can comprehend, because he is not only single-minded but also correct about the future of communications, again and again and again. Sarnoff invariably "wins" because as innovator he commands the financial and intellectual resources to take the best inventions and organize the groups necessary to turn them from paper ideas into a popular commercial product.

So is that a tragedy, and what do we make of the title? Jimmi Simpson, who played Farnsworth, was equal to the challenge of maintaining his character's near-manic drive, his optimism, and his disillusionment when he understands the inherent flaw in the camera he invented. He held his own in his encounters with Azaria's Sarnoff; more than that we see how untutored, and consequently unfocused, this genius was. It's hard to imagine a better case for nurturing the brilliant young people in our cities and our countryside than seeing young Philo trying to explain his image dissector to his ninth-grade teacher, sell his idea to a couple of traveling salesmen with some savings, and fix the unfixable in his clever but flawed TV camera.

None of this has much to do with Sarnoff, but an audience unconsciously expecting the tragic bioplay of a lone inventor finds him matched if not overshadowed by the corporate visionary and innovator. Azaria did his job all too well in filling Sarnoff's shoes. He was ambitious and commanding in the service of a noble cause, and he was also human, with a wife who knows how to take him down a peg when necessary. Without a David Sarnoff we can identify with as well as wonder at, there is no dramatic tension, no story in which an audience may ponder the wonder of our inventiveness, the ambitions and unfairness of life, the meaning of our achievements.

It's not called the The Sarnoff Innovation but it might as well be, given the RCA leader’s taking on the government and the rest of the broadcast and electronics industries to bring electronic TV to the American household, for better and worse. That story may never have the dramatic tension that Sorkin creates, at least not until Peter Sellars writes the opera. Until then Sorkin leaves us wondering whether TV is Farnsworth's invention after all.

Reader's Choice: Television: The Life Story of a Technology

We've heard from several readers how much they enjoyed the history, explanations, and style of executive director Alex Magoun's new book for Greenwood on the history of television from the discovery of a photoelectric effect in selenium in 1873 to the Consumer Electronics Show in 2007. But now Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries ("the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education"), has given it two thumbs up in this review from its February issue:

Tracing the history of television from early inception through golden age, to the current world of flat screens, cable, and satellites, Magoun (David Sarnoff Library) comprehensively overviews a medium now in everyone's memory. He readily admits that he neither watches television nor possesses any technical training in chemistry or physics, but these have not hampered his research skills. Magoun provides an interesting historical survey of major inventors, companies, and influences in the life story of a technology known as television. He writes from the perspective of a witness to the conception and birth of television. He continues to document its life from the role of a parent who ultimately must witness the eventual breaking away of the "child" so that it could forge ahead to build the revolutionary digital world, and he follows its eventual death as medium of choice for most people. Along the way, Magoun reveals how society has also evolved with each change in technology. Readers are left with an appreciation for an old friend that they enjoyed having around, as well as recognition of the role that television has played in making entertainment and communication what it is today.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates.
-- C. S. McCoy, University of South Florida

(Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.)

Magoun to Speak at Long Island Radio Day

If you live on the other side of New York City from Princeton and have no plans for Saturday, March 1, set your course for the Tilles Center Atrium at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University, the site of the second annual Long Island Radio Day! As the gateway to New York City harbor, Long Island has a tradition in wireless communications extending to the first Marconi station in the United States. This postcard shows the outpost at Babylon, Long Island, around 1905:


Inaugurated last year by the Long Island Wireless History Society, which saved that station's shack, the day's events between 10 am and 4 pm include our executive director, Dr. Alex Magoun, speaking on the history of television as no one else can, based on his critically acclaimed book; master thereminist Kip Rosser; and the Hunterdon Radio Theatre's recreation of the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles and Howard Koch's War of the Worlds. You can be sure that Alex will have a few thoughts on The Farnsworth Invention!


There's much more to see, hear, and do: tours of C. W. Post's radio station, co-sponsor WCWP 88.1 FM; hands-on and historical exhibits; model trains and planes (but no automobiles--why not?); and restored tube radios, old-time radio programs, and all sorts of curious electronica for sale. So, take a tip and take this trip!

Farnsworth Invention Trip Canceled!

We have learned that The Farnsworth Invention will be closing on March 2. Thus, our scheduled trip to see the show on March 29th has been canceled. Anyone who has already ordered tickets for this trip will receive a refund from the West Windsor-Plainsboro Community Education department.

Trip To See The Farnsworth Invention

Many of you have expressed interest in attending The Farnsworth Invention on Broadway, which has received much better reviews from the audience than many of the critics, who sometimes seem offended that a Hollywood luminary has returned to the Great White Way. Nonetheless, popular theatrical productions on the process and ambition of high-technology innovation, no matter how technically askew, are few and far between, and Hank Azaria has made the character and drive of David Sarnoff his own. West Windsor Community Education has organized a bus trip to The Farnsworth Invention matinee on Saturday, March 29. Those of you in-state who haven't seen it can get the details on page 25 of the PDF at
www.west-windsor-plainsboro.k12.nj.us/community_ed_forms/Comm%20Ed%202008.pdf.

Fill out and return the form, or call Diane at 609-716-5000 x5034 to reserve your tickets--only 49 are available, so it would be wise to act quickly. David Sarnoff Library executive director Dr. Alexander Magoun will be attending a second time, in follow-up to this Friday's performance.

Speaking of Electronic Music. . .

Our most recent email newsletter touting this Saturday's open house brought us a response from RCA Labs color TV pioneer, digital TV pioneer, and author Dick Webb, a fine IEEE Fellow who sent us a link that "just appeared last week and does the best job so far to demonstrate the virtual organ idea." Visit http://virtualorgan.com/, download the Miditzer Style 216 version 0.881 (!), and see and hear for yourself! If you're already familiar with midi digital music techniques, the virtual organ promises to expand your capabilities and horizons significantly. What would the church fathers of Halberstadt, Germany, site of the first known permanent organ in 1361, much 3rd century BCE inventor Ctesibius of Alexandria think? Probably high fives on the keyboard!

David Sarnoff, Vladimir Zworykin, and The Farnsworth Invention

Tonight, Aaron Sorkin's play finally hit the Broadway stage, and we expect the reviews will be as glowing as the buzz from the many people who saw the previews. Hank Azaria won over even those adamantly opposed to the scripted depiction of David Sarnoff through impeccable preparation and his ability to capture and play off of Sarnoff's vision of a better world united by electronic communications systems.

That said, it is well worth noting, as Paul Schatzkin has written at length in trying to redeem Phil Farnsworth's role in the invention of television, that Sorkin's play is a fiction. He writes in the broadest parody of history. He names characters after historical figures, places them in relationships vaguely relevant to their known character and behaviors, and abandons technical, legal, or commercial details for a fast-paced and engaging story in which no one comes off an innocent or a criminal.

Still, the audience leaves thinking that Vladimir Zworykin, director of electronics research at RCA from 1930-54, stole a patented idea from Farnsworth in order to make his television camera work during a visit to the younger man's San Francisco laboratory in April 1930. Is this true? No. What did Zworykin, and his patron Sarnoff, do that has resulted in them getting such bad press for the last 20 years?

They did what Thomas Edison did with electric light: take an invented, impractical technology and--with a great deal of support from engineers, scientists, technicians, marketers, investors, and customers--turn it into a commercial system that we and the rest of the world have used ever since. Alexander Magoun has written the best synthesis of the how television was innovated in the 1920s and 1930s in the relevant sections of Television: The Life Story of a Teachnology (2007). Based on available scholarship, you can ask for it at your library, borrow it through inter-library loan, or read the briefer history of relevant events below.

Patented and published proposals for television had existed since the 1880s, and an electronic solution, using no moving parts, since Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton posed the concept in 1908. Zworykin began work on electronic TV with his Russian supervisor Boris Rosing soon after, before World War I and the Russian Revolution interrupted his studies. In 1921, after Swinton elaborated on the challenge of making a camera that converted photons of light from an object into a succession of electronic images, Zworykin wrote a fellow émigré, Joseph Tykociner, about his ideas for a TV camera.

He convinced his boss at Westinghouse to invest in the project in 1923, when Zworykin applied for his first TV patent. Zworykin's initial "iconoscope," built and demonstrated in the corporate lab in East Pittsburgh, worked but poorly during a demonstration in 1925 to executives. During the process he and other inventors filed new patents on electronic imagers; Zworykin's 1925 application explained the concept of insulating the imager "pixels" for storage. To get an acceptable picture, the camera needs to store the light from an image, as electrons, between scans, to increase the dynamic range of the image's brightness. After he moved to RCA in April 1930, Zworykin spent three years recruiting skilled engineers, scientists, and technicians to overcome the bottleneck to practical, commercial, electronic TV: a camera that stored light electronically rather than requiring immense amounts of light to operate in a studio or outdoors.

Phil Farnsworth, as he preferred to be called, was the first to publicly demonstrate an electronic TV system, in 1928; unlike Westinghouse he needed the media attention to attract investors. He also won priority on a basic patent that he could not reduce to commercial practice for physical reasons that remain true today. The failed struggle against the laws of physics represents a pattern in all three of the inventions that his fans promote, and it's indicative of the real tragedy of Farnsworth's genius. What might he have done with university training, the mentorship or guidance that might have led in legitimately memorable directions?

We'll never know. The image dissector, the camera imager in which he received priority on the concept of an electrical image, had no storage capacity for the photo-electrons landing on its imager between scans. That is, it converted into electrons only the photons emitted from an object at the moment of scanning, which occurred 30 times a second. Since those 30 moments represent an infinitesimal fraction of a second, very little light information is captured for transmission. As a result the image dissector requires extremely high light levels, from bright sunlight or carbon arc lamps (used in movie projectors), to give a good picture. It was used only briefly in broadcasting movies and in certain industrial environments. For live action its primary advantage over the electromechanical systems that John Logie Baird and Charles Jenkins pioneered in the mid-1920s was the prospect of a larger if equally dim picture.

Zworykin was one of a series of corporate visitors to Farnsworth's lab, for the latter's backers were increasingly desperate as the Depression deepened to retrieve some of their investment. He spent three days in friendly and diplomatic engagement with the younger inventor and his amateur staff, and sent instructions on how to make a better image dissector back east for use until his team could reduce the iconoscope to practice. Shortly after returning himself, Zworykin filed another patent application specifying the storage principle in his imager.

How good was the image dissector? Consider these photos from Donald Godfrey's solid if flawed biography, Philo T. Farnsworth: The Inventor of Television (2001). In the first, showing a photo and a screenshot around 1929, Pem Farnsworth closes her eyes against the light needed to capture her image, possibly outdoors. In the second, Farnsworth stages some football dummies on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway during his 1934 demonstrations. It appears to be overcast, so note the two stage lights set up to illuminate the target for the camera.

The fact that Farnsworth had a valid and well-written patent on the next big thing, however, forced Sarnoff and RCA to look further into his work. In the spring of 1931, Sarnoff visited the lab during a trip to California on sound-on-film business. As luck would have it, Farnsworth was closing a research deal with RCA's leading radio set rival, Philco, in Philadelphia because his San Francisco investors had abandoned him. In his absence, Sarnoff offered $100,000 for his patents as an opening bid in what should have been a negotiated settlement. But Farnsworth relayed a flat rejection to bring his family to north Philadelphia, where his boss Albert Murray was an ex-RCA manager who had previously given the image dissector a negative evaluation.

Late in 1932, one of Zworykin's team, Sanford Essig, overbaked an image plate and realized serendipitously that the mosaicked pattern of silver globules gave the world's researchers (besides Farnsworth) what they were looking for: a technique for insulating the image sensor's "pixels." Six months later, Zworykin began publishing the article on the iconoscope in five countries; within two years it had become the standard camera imager and with further improvements the U.S. and German militaries used it successfully in TV-guided missiles during World War II as well as in studio and outdoor cameras.

How good was the iconoscope? Here are two photos of Zworykin in the Camden lab and on-screen from around 1932-33, from the Leslie Flory Collection at the David Sarnoff Library, in an early internal demonstration of its sensitivity.

Meanwhile, Farnsworth attempted to work around the lack of storage and prior work by adding an electron multiplier to the image dissector. To avoid others' patents and disclosures, his "multipactor" differed from the multipliers developed by German researchers and improved by Zworykin and his team. Theirs kicked off additional electrons from a pinwheel or cascade design that triggered more electrons in proportion to those generated by the initial signal. The sequence could be repeated as desired to amplify the signal without stressing each of the successive paddles or plates. Farnsworth's multipactor simply bounced the growing number of electrons between only two plates with the result that it burned out very quickly and was never commercialized.

The problem for RCA was not in its approach to a TV camera, but in the priority of patents. Remember that patent systems are designed to assign a single inventor as a commercial incentive to invention. Patent conflicts obscure the fact that multiple people operating within the same domain of knowledge--like previous patents, publications, and usually educational programs--conceive regularly and independently similar solutions to problems. Thus Farnsworth and Max Dieckmann in Germany conceived of the dead end of the image dissector; Zworykin and at least four other inventors thought of ways to store electronic images for television.

Farnsworth's patent involving the concept of an electrical image in a TV camera issued in 1930 after Zworykin's visit. Two years later the Patent Office put it in "interference" with Zworykin's 1923 application. Naturally RCA defended its claims, and the court battle took four years to settle. Farnsworth won, largely on the basis of his public demonstration, and it remains unknown why Westinghouse wasn't more helpful in documenting Zworykin's work, which is now preserved on microfilm at the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. RCA had to license Farnsworth's patent and did so in 1939. Farnsworth and his company needed RCA's support since it had Zworykin's camera and the market power to innovate the commercial system. As a result, Farnsworth joined the enemy; he became part of the patent pool, exchanging his set of inventions for a million dollars and access to some 3,000 RCA patents.

The money offset ten years of Farnsworth's expenses while representing ten percent of RCA's investment in creating, testing, and making a complete system. Between 1939 and 1941, the two rivals became allies. Farnsworth recovered from one of his alcoholic periods to file for several more patents. Led by Sarnoff, RCA and Farnsworth's new company fought the rest of the radio and broadcast industries--Philco, Zenith, CBS, DuMont, etc.--and the Federal Communications Commission for approval of a commercial television standard. Sarnoff described Farnsworth in 1940 to a congressional committee as the man who had done more for television than anyone else outside RCA. In theory a standard would allow Farnsworth to make some money on the cameras using Zworykin's iconoscope, although the royalties on, say, the first five years of camera sales were hardly likely to cover current expenses.

The FCC's delay, consumer resistance to the available programming, and World War II all meant that commercial innovation would have to wait. Farnsworth's basic patents expired in 1947, when RCA was still two years from netting the first profits on its $50 million investment. Meanwhile ITT bought Farnsworth's struggling company and retained him as a vice president in research, allowing him to work on what he liked while enjoying stock options and a handsome salary.

Farnsworth's third memorable invention was electrostatic containment of nuclear fusion for the home heating and power. This proved even more impractical than the first two; there is a possibility that the technique could be made to work with a hydrogen isotope found in abundance on the dark side of the moon. Whether or not Farnsworth knew that, he spent a lot of ITT's money and then all of his own savings tilting at his final windmill in the 1960s. That, not RCA's patent strategy or the FCC's caution in setting a television standard, is why his family had nothing to show financially for a brilliant but mentor-less career.

RCA's staff moved beyond Zworykin's inventions to create better TV cameras during and after World War II. The image orthicon and the vidicon drew on Farnsworth's patent for low-velocity electron-beam scanning, along with numerous other RCA-invented techniques, materials, and components, to become the namesake for the Emmy award and video imagers used throughout the world and space into the 1980s. These tubes also used the storage principle, electron multipliers, and thin-film techniques for the image target that also helped Paul Weimer go on to make the first thin-film transistors (TFTs).

In sum, go to The Farnsworth Invention for the snappy dialog, the great acting, the comedy within the wrong tragedy. Respect the inventor Farnsworth for demonstrating an electronic TV signal at the age of 21, and pity him for the lost opportunities educationally and professionally, had he chosen to work in RCA's labs in the 1930s instead of ITT's in the 1950s. Admire the scientist, Zworykin, for recognizing his own limitations and assembling the team of technologists necessary to make television work as a system. And remain in awe of Sarnoff, the innovator, in whose absence from the historical record one wonders who would have led the free-market United States into the video age.