Today in 1927, 21-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth transmits through purely electronic means an image of a line with a device he called an “image dissector.” “That’s it folks. We’ve done it,” Farnsworth said to his assistants. “There you have electronic television.”
From the IEEE Global History Network:
Farnsworth’s Image Dissector worked pretty well, but it was not sensitive enough to capture scenes unless there was lots of light. Very hot and bright arc lights sometimes had to be used, and these made it hard for people to stand near the camera. Although Farnsworth improved the tube later and showed how it could be used for TV, his competitors at RCA, most notably Vladimir Zworykin, were working on a different tube they called the Iconoscope.
When commercial broadcasts began in the late 1930s, Farnsworth’s tube was left behind. However, it had certain advantages over the Iconoscope, and it remained in use for many years, but not for regular TV. There were certain uses of closed-circuit TV where an Image Dissector was useful, such as when engineers wanted to monitor the bright, hot interior of an industrial furnace.
Eventually, Farnsworth won a patent battle with RCA over his claim to have invented the first “all electronic” television camera, but that victory would have been more glorious if his technology had become the standard in TV broadcasting.
Harold Evans (in They Made America) quotes Farnsworth’s belief in the positive power of the new medium: “If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past.” But only a few years later, in 1935, another forecast, advanced by the philosopher Rudolph Arnheim, was decidedly mixed: “Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep” (quoted in Steven Lubar’s InfoCulture).
But the New York Times was not worried. Reviewing a demonstration of television at the 1939 World’s Fair, it declared “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.”
In 1996, this prediction has finally started to become true, as the Scientific American observed: “Something intriguing is happening in American homes. Computers seem to be luring away people from the television set. It’s still too early to tell if this is the long-heralded end of the 50-year obsession with the ‘idiot box.’ But it does seem to be the beginning of an affair with CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web, and as it heats up, the door is thrown open for another generation of stars.”
Also in 1996, according to Wikipedia, in a videotaped interview by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Elma Farnsworth recounted what Philo thought about the value of television after seeing how it showed 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.
In March 2013, Philo Farnsworth was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.