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The son of a Mormon farmer, Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a single-room log cabin on an isolated homestead in Utah. The Farnsworth family farm had no radio, no telephone, and no electricity. Yet, motivated by the stories of scientists and inventors he read about in the science magazines of the day, young Philo set his sights on becoming an inventor. By his early teens, Farnsworth had become an inveterate tinkerer, able to repair broken farm equipment when no one else could. It was inevitable that when he read an article about a new idea — for the transmission of pictures by radio waves—that he would want to attempt it himself. One day while he was walking through a hay field, Farnsworth took note of the straight, parallel lines of the furrows and envisioned a system of scanning a visual image line by line and transmitting it to a remote screen. He soon sketched a diagram for an early television camera tube. It was 1921 and Farnsworth was only fourteen years old.
Farnsworth went on to college to pursue his studies of electrical engineering but was forced to quit after two years due to the death of his father. Even so, he soon managed to persuade a group of California investors to set him up in his own research lab where, in 1927, he produced the first all-electronic television image and later patented his invention. While Farnsworth's invention was a landmark, it was also the beginning of a struggle against an immense corporate power that would consume much of his life. That corporate power was embodied by a legendary media mogul, RCA President and NBC founder David Sarnoff, who claimed that his chief scientist had invented a mechanism for television prior to Farnsworth's. Thus the boy genius and the mogul were locked in a confrontation over who would control the future of television technology and the vast fortune it represented. Farnsworth was enormously outmatched by the media baron and his army of lawyers and public relations people, and, by the 1940s, Farnsworth would be virtually forgotten as television's actual inventor, while Sarnoff and his chief scientist would receive the credit.
Restoring Farnsworth to his rightful place in history, The Boy Genius and the Mogul presents a vivid portrait of a self-taught scientist whose brilliance allowed him to "capture light in a bottle." A rich and dramatic story of one man’s perseverance and the remarkable events leading up to the launch of television as we know it, The Boy Genius and the Mogul shines new light on a major turning point in American history.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 7, 2002 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780767913218
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780767913218
- File size: 994 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 11, 2002
The book jacket asserts that it will tell the story of television's "real" inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, a 14-year-old Idaho farm boy. It's a clever—and accurate—hook, since no one inventor can take credit for the magic black box. What makes Farnsworth unique—aside from an intuitive leap while mowing a hayfield in 1922—is that he outlasted everyone else in his patent battle against RCA's David Sarnoff, who famously said, "RCA doesn't pay royalties. It collects them." Sarnoff makes a good foil: both men struggled up from poverty, Sarnoff by climbing the corporate ladder and Farnsworth by convincing financial backers to fund his research. Unfortunately for Farnsworth, "the era of the solitary inventor was quickly fading." Large, well-funded corporate laboratories were taking their place in the 1930s and reducing the inventor to a contract engineer. Stashower, a journalist and Edgar Award–winning biographer (for Teller of Tales), is also the author of three murder mysteries. He ends every chapter with a cliffhanger, which gets monotonous. However, his flair for storytelling does help move the book along through the necessary passages of technical jargon. Instilled with the glories of Edison, Ford and Gates, the public still romanticizes the genius in the attic, while recognizing that the spoils generally go to the rich and powerful. Agent, Donald Maass. (On sale Apr. 9)Forecast:This is the first mainstream book on such a big topic—it beats Evan I. Schwartz's
The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (HarperCollins) by one month. Look for the review of Schwartz's book in Forecasts next month. The nearly simultaneous publication of both books guarantees attention, but could stunt each of their sales possiblities. -
March 15, 2002
Beginning in the 1880s, researchers and inventors spent years trying to develop a means to transmit an image generated in one place to a separate receiving device. The idea, which became known as television, sparked a great race among a select few visionaries who strove to produce a working model. It was a 14-year-old farm boy who came up with the revolutionary idea that would ultimately make television possible as we know it today. Yet young Philo Farnsworth, with limited funding and a handful of friends to help build the apparatus, could not compete with the powerful David Sarnoff, president of RCA, who was determined to become the leader in the television effort. This book intermingles biographies of both men with the broader story of television's early years. Stashower treads a thin line in the amount of technical detail he provides; it is enough to give the reader an idea of what the inventors had to work with, yet simplified enough to be accessible to a general audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)
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