Farnsworth, Philo Taylor

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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b. 19 August 1906 Beaver, Utah, USA

d. 11 March 1971 Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

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American engineer and independent inventor who was a pioneer in the development of television.

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Whilst still in high school, Farnsworth became interested in the possibility of television and conceived many of the basic features of a practicable system of TV broadcast and reception. Following two years of study at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1926 he cofounded the Crocker Research Laboratories in San Francisco, subsequently Farnsworth Television Inc. (1929) and Farnsworth Radio \& Television Corporation, Fort Wayne, Indiana (1938). There he began a lifetime of research, primarily in the field of television. In 1927, with the backing of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the collaboration of Vladimir Zworykin, he demonstrated the first all-electronic television system, based on his early ideas for an image dissector tube, the first electronic equivalent of the Nipkow disc. With this rudimentary sixty-line system he was able to transmit a recognizable dollar sign and file the first of many TV patents. From then on he contributed to a variety of developments in the fields of vacuum tubes, radar and atomic-power generation, with patents on cathode ray tubes, amplifying and pick-up tubes, electron multipliers and photoelectric materials.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Institute of Radio Engineers Morris Leibmann Memorial Prize 1941.

Bibliography

1930, British patent nos. 368,309 and 368,721 (for his image dissector).

1934, "Television by electron image scanning", Journal of the Franklin Institute 218:411 (describes the complete image-dissector system).

Further Reading

J.H.Udelson, 1982, The Great Television Race: A History of the American Television Industry 1925–1941, University of Alabama Press.

O.E.Dunlop Jr, 1944, Radio's 100 Men of Science.

G.R.M.Garratt \& A.H.Mumford, 1952, "The history of television", Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers III A Television 99.

See also: Baird, John Logie; Jenkins, Charles Francis

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