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.

Princeton is About to Buzz: The Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra Returns

What’s the buzz about? After a wired holiday celebration last December, the Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra returns to Sarnoff Corporation's Auditorium on Saturday, March 15th with its mountains of synthesizers, keyboards, sequencers, gizmos, gadgets, and electro-gear. Doors open at 7:00 PM for this ear- and eye-expanding event, with refreshments provided by Grovers Mill Coffee and McCaffrey's bakery. Admission is $10.00 for the general public; paying Friends of the David Sarnoff Library and students 18 and under with a valid school ID receive a five dollar discount.

This time around the infamous, mutating orchestra personnel have been hand-picked by founders Howard Moscovitz and Greg Waltzer. During the first half of the evening, various members will perform short sets of electrifying compositions before returning in the second half as the full Chamber Orchestra in a sizzling celebration of Spring.

The audience will meet Fringe Element, a quartet of electro-musicians: Michael Victor, Greg Waltzer, Jose Murcia and James Lacey. Their wholly spontaneous creations will lead everyone out of the ordinary and into a world of unpredictable, flowing soundscapes. Their two CDs, Rampant Biology and Organic Chemistry are available at electro-music.com. Another of the evening’s permutations will see Greg Waltzer leave the Fringe to build lush, ambient sonic constructs with partners Howard Moscovitz and Bill Fox. Together, they become the resonant force called Xeroid Entity. The evening’s mutations continue with Howard freed of the trio to perform solo, bringing us deep into the reverberating harmonies and silences of his own universe. He’ll then be joined by thereminist Kip Rosser (Remember the theremin? The electronic instrument that’s played without being touched!). The duo will present their dreamy, evocative improvisations, soon to be released on their CD, Exploration of the Black Exterior. The metamorphosis will be completed in the evening’s second half, as all personnel become the Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra. Their composition will be an entirely new experiment in which the music is “conducted” by utilizing a complex numbering system, under the direction of Howard Moscovitz.

This feast for the ears is also going to be a banquet for the eyes. State-of-the-art visuals will send the audience on a parallel trip presented by Azimuth Visuals. The premiere diva of computer-generated abstract images, animations, and original artwork, Hong Waltzer will be processing and mixing video in real time. Inspired by the music being created onstage, her dynamic collages bring even more depth to the musical oceans.

Perfect for young and old, electronic music enthusiasts and traditional music-lovers alike, this is a great occasion to treat aspiring musicians to sights and sounds they’ve never experienced before. Don’t miss this evening of boundary-breaking music making. Get a real buzz, and kick off Spring with the Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra!

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!

The World's Youngest Archival Assistant?

Until someone proves us differently, Vivian Zhang is the world's youngest archival assistant. A hardworking fourth-grade student in Montgomery, New Jersey, she helps at the Library on holidays, thanks to her father, who works at Sarnoff Corporation. Since last spring, when Vivian helped dry out hundreds of color slides, she has also assisted with resleeving and relabeling the negative collection of RCA Laboratories staff and rehousing Jan Rajchman's publications series in archival folders. Vivian's attention to detail, clear handwriting, dedication, and good humor are a big help not only to us but to future researchers!

IEEE Adds TV!

We're very excited to see the world's largest engineering organization, the IEEE (formerly known as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) add video to its website. IEEE.tv provides free streamed videos to those interested in what engineers do in some crucial areas for our future: environmentally sensitive design, transport, energy, and manufacturing, and what they've done in the past, courtesy of the IEEE History Center's first videohistory, with Jerry Minter, who specializes in collision-avoidance inventions.

It's wonderful to see the IEEE expand its outreach online; IEEE.tv is a great complement to TryEngineering, a seven-language (!) collaboration with IBM to encourage more young people to consider and commit themselves to careers in engineering. There's something here for students, parents, teachers, and counselors, who can play engineering games; meet male and female engineers in aerospace, computer, and biomedical careers, among others; look for internships and college or university programs; and borrow from lesson plans, all online.

Williams Receives Braun Prize

We are pleased to announce that Library friend Richard "Dick" Williams is this year's recipient of the Society for Information Display's Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize for an outstanding technical achievement in, or contribution to, display technology. After a year of researching materials that would provide an electro-optic effect appropriate for a flat-panel display, Dick discovered and demonstrated in 1962 the fundamental effect of a low voltage generating an optical effect in a thin film of liquid crystals between glass plates coated with transparent conductors. He applied for the basic patent on transmissive and reflective displays using liquid crystals and published three articles in 1963 on his discovery of what researchers now call Williams Domains. Out of his methodical experimentation and publication, stimulated by David Sarnoff's wish for a TV to hang on a wall, came the innovation of the LCDs all around us.

For an extensive history of the innovation of LCDs, see Hirohisa Kawamoto's article for IEEE Proceedings.

Dick is far more than a one-trick pony. If you encounter him on one of his walks in Princeton's Littlebrook neighborhood, you might offer your congratulations and then ask him how he taught himself enough Chinese to lecture for eight weeks in Ulan Bator, or how dust actually damages fine machinery, or how to spot meteorite craters in Brazil, or how we could slow global warming by freeing energy from coal without burning it. . . .

3 Deaths in the Family

It is with sadness that we mark the passing on Monday of Harry Kihn, who served RCA and its laboratories and technologies with distinction and honor from the beginnings of television in 1939 to the beginnings of computer chips in 1977. A Life Fellow of the IEEE, Harry received 27 patents on everything from FM altimeters during World War II to "Kihn's Kolor Killer" for monochrome reception of color TV signals to digital decoder circuits for an early version of a cell phone. As a self-described "trouble shooter," in the second, corporate half of his career, Harry reviewed systems designs for the Air Force Autodin network and RCA's Spectra 70 computers, and carried out studies on a variety of subjects including digital communications, solid-state devices for consumer electronics, and laser projects at RCA.

Harry's dedication to the nomination of the IEEE Milestone for the invention of monochrome-compatible color television helps explain executive director Alex Magoun's commitment to the Library and the heritage it represents. He first met Harry while researching his dissertation topic at the Library in the mid 1990s, and Harry's explanation of the enormity of RCA's work in electronic television as well as the other technologies with which he was involved helped convince Alex that the Library deserved greater visibility.

Harry was 96. Please join us in offering condolences to his children, Michael and Les, and his grandsons, Edward and Thomas.

We also note the death of William C. "Wilkie" Wilkinson, who helped pioneer air-to-ground radar from World War II through the 1950s at the Princeton Labs before joining the Astro-Electronics Division in Hightstown. There he led the projects to develop antennas for the Apollo Lunar Orbiter, Excursion Module, and Lunar Rover, as well as the Viking Mars Lander. He wrote--and we wish we could read the rest of what must be a fascinating memoir--"For 53 years I was paid to do what I enjoyed doing." We should all be so fortunate, or determined.

And please join in extending sympathy to the Cuomo family, whose patriarch Frank died January 16. As a carpenter at the Princeton Labs from 1949 to 1991, Frank holds a special place in the history of the Library, for he designed and built the cabinetry, display mounts, and sliding frames therein under David Sarnoff's direction. If you've noticed the quality of the woodwork during a visit, you've admired the skill of this master craftsman.

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.

Looking back while Looking Ahead

We've just concluded an amazing week: four days of field trips for 200 third graders, and another jam-packed open house on Saturday. If the engagement of the children from Dutch Neck Elementary School is any indication, the American prospect is brighter than we think. They took in Alex Magoun's illustrated talk on David Sarnoff's immigrant experience, they collected data in a wide-ranging scavenger hunt in the museum under Sharon Chapman and Vrinda Kaimal's guidance, and they mastered the concepts of sound waves, propagation, and reproduction in some cool interactive programs run by Alex and musician Samantha Chapman. Several of them returned Saturday, parents literally in tow, to see and hear thereminist Kip Rosser and the electronic musicians of Brainstatik.

We'd like to thank all of the above, plus those who helped behind the scenes: Jeff Grabel for organizing this enlarged sequel to last spring's pilot trip; Dutch Neck principal Scott Feder; Carolann Churins, Sarnoff Corporation vice president for adminstration; educational consultant Jane Eilbacher; Forrest Bradbury of Princeton University, and Mike Bunting, Mike Kane, Dennis McClary, and Fred Vannozzi of Sarnoff Corporation for more technical support than you can imagine.

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!

Remember The Open House on Saturday!

As posted below, on Saturday, January 19th between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm we will be hosting an Open House at the David Sarnoff Library. Dr. Alexander Magoun will be offering guided tours of the library's exhibits at 10:00, 11:00, 1:00, 2:00 and 3:00; thereminist Kip Rosser and Brainstatik will be providing musical entertainment; and the New Jersey Antique Radio Club will host a radio repair clinic.

Admission to the open house is free, although donations to support the library are always gladly accepted. Directions to the library can be found here.

We hope to see many Friends of the Library on Saturday, as well as some of the charming Dutch Neck Elementary School third graders who have been visiting the library this week on field trips. And, of course, we always hope to welcome first-time guests and other returning visitors who want to see just what all of the fuss is about.

Radio Merit Badge Day at the David Sarnoff Library

We just qualified 55 Boy Scouts from all over the Central New Jersey Council for their radio merit badges today! The David Sarnoff Library, with the generous support of Sarnoff Corporation, hosts this wonderful event on the first Saturday of every January because it can provide the space for the Boy Scout leaders and their amateur radio volunteers to set up four work stations and four radio stations, as well as two or even three classrooms for the scouts to work through the requirements of the radio merit badge. In four years, over 250 scouts have qualified, and many of them have pursued their amateur radio operator's licenses as well.

First the staff had to set up their posts, like this one on the Library patio, bright and early in the morning.

Then the scouts and their parents have to appear and sign in, and when they've gathered in the auditorium, organizer Gary Wilson, K2GW, welcomes them and explains the day's schedule. The Library's executive director, Alex Magoun, introduces the crowd to David Sarnoff's amazing career in radio, starting as an office boy and wireless operator and ending as a seer of our internetworked wireless world in the 21st century.

With that story fresh in their minds, the scouts make their appointed rounds: to the Lounge,the patio, the office suite, and the museum, among others.

At the end of the day, the scouts gathered again in the Auditorium to receive their certificates (the badges are in the mail). But they received far more than they bargained for, because Princeton University's Dr. Joe Taylor, K1JT and Nobel Laureate, dropped by to explain how his radio hobby and experiments as a child got him started on a wonderfully fulfilling career in physics and radio astronomy, in which he and fellow Nobel Laureate Dr. Russell Hulse discovered the first binary pulsar. O, the places you can go in wireless!

Library Open House and Repair Clinic

Happy 2008, everyone, as the David Sarnoff Library prepares for an even bigger and better year of education on innovation, based on RCA's amazing legacy! Save the date of Saturday, January 19, from 10 am to 4 pm, as the Library opens its doors once again to a variety of wonderful indoor activities.

Have you seen or heard about Aaron Sorkin's Broadway hit, The Farnsworth Invention, and want to know more? RCA and television historian Dr. Alex Magoun will offer guided tours of the Library's exhibits on the hour at 10 and 11 am and 1, 2, and 3 pm. See and hear the incredible stories behind David Sarnoff's amazing life, and the remarkable inventors at RCA who brought you everything from microchip computers to color TV!

This year we're bringing back electronic music through the kind services of Kip Rosser, master thereminist, and Brainstatik, one of the groups who blew audiences away at our Electromusic Chamber Concert last December! Kip engages and enthralls young and old with the amazing electronic instrument that plays music through handwaving. Kip's Theremin Feast in the David Sarnoff Dining Room will offer menus with everything from appetizers (the history of the theremin divided up into story tidbits) to Classical Entrees (classical music) to Romantic Suppers for Two (jazz songs with a romance theme) to a Beatles Buffet(self-explanatory) and more. There will be a total of about 50 songs and pieces on the menu. Kip will explain and play the theremin in the David Sarnoff Dining Room between 10 am and 1 pm, offering visitors a chance to play for themselves.

Meanwhile, in the afternoon, Brainstatik's musicians and technicians use a variety of synthesizers to replicate and embellish the sounds made by keyboard, reed, string, and percussion instruments, all to a shifting and synchronized background of light and video. while Brainstatik with take the auditorium stage from 2 to 4 pm. What better way to unwind after a hard week or day?

Finally, if you've an old, or old, old radio, make an appointment for the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's repair clinic. If its experts can't fix it for you in an hour, they can surely tell all about where and when it was made--for free! Contact Phil Vourtsis at pvourtsis@optonline.net to make an appointment; be ready to have the make and model number of your tabletop or console treasure.

The Library doesn't charge admission but suggests a $5 donation per person if you enjoyed your visit.

Need directions? Use 201 Washington Road, 08540 on your favorite internet map and follow the signs at Sarnoff Corporation's entrance to the non-profit Library.

Electromusic Chamber Orchestra Thrills Crowd

Suffering from Bach fatigue and intrigued by electronic multimedia made flesh, neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night intimidated nearly 50 people from attending the David Sarnoff Library's concert this evening. And what a concert it was, alternately soothing and stimulating electronic music and images synchronized on Sarnoff Corporation's stage in two fascinating sets. Brain Statik and Xeroid Entity opened while Hong Waltzer mixed a DVD and some software to project a shifting montage of imagery, patterns, and colors through an LCD projector, and Brain Statik's Ken Palmer provided arrays of fixed and fluid lighting on-stage. There was a little bit of everything--after all, you can do a lot with guitar, saxophone, drum, and piano synthesizers. When we have photos or links to the music, we'll post them, but take it on good authority that they were worthy heirs to the legacy of RCA's Harry Olson and the Mark I Music Synthesizer built at the RCA Labs in the early 1950s.

After an intermission where the audience adjourned to Grover's Mill Coffee and McCaffrey's cookies as well as the Library's museum, the chamber players also known as the Martian Radio Orchestra--Howard Moscovitz, thereminist Kip Rosser, and Greg Waltzer--joined Brain Statik, Xeroid Entity, and Hong Waltzer onstage for another fascinating set of improvisations that gained sustained applause and enthusiastic endorsements by the happy crowd. Once again, the Library provided a space where people from a wide array of backgrounds and interests could bridge C. P. Snow's two cultures of art and science, and learn something about both as well as their combination.

Will they be back? You bet; save Saturday night, March 15, for our spring equinox show! If that's too far away, make plans to visit during our open house and NJARC radio repair clinic on Saturday, January 19. Details will follow, but Brain Statik will be back, and Kip Rosser is a good bet to play the theremin. For now, let's thank them all for coming out, along with Library volunteers Sharon Chapman and Vrinda Kaimal for running the ticket booth and gift shop, and Dr. Rebecca Mercuri of the Princeton ACM/IEEE-CS group for making it all happen!

Kaimal Completes Broadcast Manual Index

It was a dull job, but someone had to do it, and that someone was Vrinda Kaimal. Like other volunteers she started with one day a week, and then as the pages turned and she kept typing into a spreadsheet the dot-matrixed printed entries from the RCA Broadcast Manuals Index (1930-1984), something magical happened. She began coming in two days, and then three, caught up in the lines of print, patiently tapping away at MI and IB numbers, and esoteric entries like this:

31535 B1 ES-561485/6/7 BTG-5AL/10AL/20AL/20AR AUTOMATIC LOGGING EQUIPMENT,

where 31535 equals the IB (Instruction Book) number, B1 the file cabinet and drawer that no longer exist, ES-561485/6/7 the MI (Master Index) number, and BTG-5AL/10AL/20AL/20AR the model numbers for a device related to Broadcast Transmitters.

Wouldn't that make your eyeballs glaze over before they fell on to the keyboard? Not Vrinda's. After all, this 20-year-old binder and its 61 pages of single-spaced entries represent the only control to the 25 file cabinets of manuals donated to the Library through the good offices of Stu Cooke. While the flood last spring dissolved all the marked archival boxes holding the manuals, this spreadsheet will enable us to inventory what's in the freeze-dried boxes. Then we can try to fill in for the water-ruined copies with the duplicates sorted by Phil Vourtsis in his quiet times in the basement in 2006:

So hats to Vrinda and to Phil for their part in the unending labors of establishing intellectual control over the ever-growing holdings of our archives!

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.

Special Event -- Electro-Music Concert on December 15th!

GET REALLY WIRED MUSIC FOR THE HOLIDAYS

The Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra Comes to Princeton

December 15, 2007 Sarnoff Corporation Auditorium

7:30 PM 201 Washington Rd
Princeton NJ 08540-6449

Admission $10 per person at the door

For information: 609-734-2636

It’s the time of year when the streets and houses glow and twinkle with festive lights. Everything’s wired and bright, including the Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra, the sonic ensemble that’s more plugged in than a city block.

The Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra brings its arsenal of synthesizers, keyboards, and bizarre machinery to the David Sarnoff Library Auditorium On Saturday, December 15^th for an evening of truly electrifying and sonorous musical mischief. Doors open at 7:00 PM for this rare event, with refreshments on hand provided by Grovers Mill Coffee and McCaffrey's bakery, thanks in part to the support of the Princeton ACM/IEEE-CS under the initiative of Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. Admission is $10.00 for the general public; online advance purchases can be made via Paypal at sales@davidsarnoff.org. For more information, please call 609-734-2636.

On the roster for the orchestra’s evolving membership are Howard Moscovitz, Greg Waltzer, and Bill Fox. As a trio in their own right, they’re known as Xeroid Entity, creators of rhythmic and ambient otherworldly soundscapes. http://xeroid-entity.com/

Joining them will be special guests Brainstatik, featuring Robert Burger, Ken Palmer, Mike Hunter, Jim Silvestri and Glenn Robitaille. Combining ambient, world, progressive rock, and space music, Brainstatik takes audiences on uncharted improvisational journeys,shifting and mixing genres within each piece.

Any self-respecting electronic chamber orchestra would be incomplete without the granddaddy of all electronic instruments: the theremin, the only instrument that’s played without being touched. Thereminist Kip Rosser will be on hand to weave the theremin’s haunting and beautiful voices into the mix. http://www.performancekr.com/theremin.html

Taking the stage first will be Brainstatik, each member a certified electronic gear junkie. Guitars can sound like drums, keyboards can imitate guitars and drums can play keyboards. The resulting performance often sounds rehearsed and composed, but in reality it happens in the moment. Brainstatik thrives on taking its music to the edge every time they perform.

http://www.brainstatik.com

During the second set of the evening, Moscovitz, Waltzer, Fox, and Rosser will complete the ensemble. The full Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra will perform a collaborative exploration of the vast territories of harmony, rhythm, melody and silence. Think Vangelis meets sci-fi with a dash of Brian Eno.

The evening will be set against the stunning visual backdrops of video artist Hong Waltzer, who will bridge sight and sound by creating her fluid and colorful “living paintings” that respond to the music in real time. Expand your ears, eyes, mind, and your definition of music–get really wired on the sight and sounds of the Electro-Music Chamber Orchestra.

Cognitive Radio Networks at Sarnoff!

What happens when you crossbreed computers and radios? Professor Narayan B. Mandayam of Rutgers University will explain in a free lecture at Sarnoff Corporation's auditorium next to the David Sarnoff Library Thursday, December 6, at 6:30 p.m. If you thought satellite radio was the last word in audio or video delivery, think again! Sponsored by the IEEE Princeton Section's Communications and Consumer Electronics Chapter, Dr. Mandayam's talk covers not only the technical requirements for software-defined radio networking but also considers the implications for broadcast and spectrum regulation and the future of the wireless internet. Here's his abstract, with his bio further below:

Recent advances in programmable integrated circuits have created an opportunity to develop a new class of intelligent or “cognitive” radios which can adapt to a wide variety of radio interference conditions and multiple protocol standards for collaboration between otherwise incompatible systems. Such a cognitive radio would be capable of very dynamic physical layer adaptation via scanning of available spectrum, selection from a wide range of operating frequencies (possibly non-contiguous), rapid adjustment of modulation waveforms and adaptive power control. In addition, a suitably designed cognitive radio with a software-defined physical layer would be capable of collaborating with neighboring radios to ameliorate interference using higher-layer protocols. Perhaps for the first time in the short history of networking, cognitive radios offer the potential for organic formation of “infrastructure-less” collaborative network clusters with dynamic adaptation at every layer of the protocol stack including physical, link and network layers.

While the development of cognitive radio hardware and software, especially at the physical layer, has received considerable attention, the question of how one transforms a set of cognitive radios into a cognitive network is much less well understood. This talk will present an overview of cognitive radio network research from the points of view of information and coding theory, game theory, collaborative and cooperative communications. The implications of such cognitive radio networks to spectrum policy as well as the design of the future internet will also be highlighted.

Narayan B. Mandayam is Professor at Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering,Rutgers University. He also serves as Associate Director at WINLAB. His research interests are in various aspects of wireless data transmission ncluding system modeling and performance, signal processing and radio resource management with emphasis on techniques for cognitive radio technologies. Dr. Mandayam is a recipient of the Institute Silver Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1989 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1998. He was selected by the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 for the Annual Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering. He is a coauthor with C. Comaniciu and H. V. Poor of the book "Wireless Networks: Multiuser Detection in Cross-Layer Design," Springer, NY. He has served as an EditorWireless Communications (2002-2004) and as a guest editor of the IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Adaptive, Spectrum Agile and Cognitive Radio Networks. He is currently serving as a guest editor of the upcoming IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Game Theory in Communication Systems.