The idea was floating around long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to eventually produce what we know as TV today. Morse developed the telegraph , the system of sending messages translated into beeping sounds along wires.
Both Bell and Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sounds. But it was a German researcher who took the next important step toward developing the technology that made television possible. In , Paul Nipkow came up with a system of sending images through wires via spinning discs.
He called it the electric telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television. Meanwhile, Scottish engineer John Baird gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in central London in With his new invention, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company, and in it achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic.
Baird is also credited with giving the first demonstration of both color and stereoscopic television. In , Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television system at a convention of radio engineers. He envisioned a system that would break an image into horizontal lines and reassemble those lines into a picture at the other end. Only electrons could capture, transmit and reproduce a clear moving figure.
This eureka experience happened at the age of He and his wife, Elma Gardner Farnsworth, moved from Utah to California to be closer to the motion-picture community and keep working on their innovation. Two years later, Farnsworth transmitted an image of Elma and her brother, making her the first woman on TV.
The parallel to modern-day Silicon Valley extended to Farnsworth's ownership of his work. But her husband was hoping to license the rights for producing televisions to RCA at the time. The plan was to maintain closely the patent ownership inside the Farnsworth Company, but to charge RCA and dozens of other companies an ongoing percentage on the sets that they would sell.
So as not to disrupt any negotiations, Farnsworth decided to avoid any legal action. Eisenhower in recognition of his wartime assistance, was already marshalling his forces for the expected postwar boom. Reeling from years of severe stress, Farnsworth suffered a nervous breakdown and was bedridden for several months before the war.
Afterward, he and Pem relocated to Fort Wayne, where his new factory began volume production of television sets. But time ran out. RCA captured nearly 80 percent of the market, while Farnsworth was forced to sell the assets of his company to International Telephone and Telegraph, an industrial conglomerate that quickly decided to exit the commercial TV business. In the late s, Sarnoff sued to prevent CBS from broadcasting in color-a technology both RCA and CBS were racing to develop-on the grounds that it would disrupt the market for black-and-white television.
By then, RCA had seeded the market with millions of its black-and-white sets. A main bragging point was so-called backwards compatibility. It was similar to the unique position Microsoft would hold many decades later, when it would be the only company that could create a format, Windows, that could execute older MS-DOS programs.
But Sarnoff kept at it until the marketplace came around. So by the time RCA entered into a landmark consent decree with the Justice Department in , agreeing to license its color TV technology freely to anyone for a reasonable price, the color war was over and RCA had crushed the competition-again. As Sarnoff steamrolled his competitors, he rewrote history. Farnsworth became the answer to an obscure trivia question. Farnsworth was broke, severely depressed and largely forgotten; Sarnoff was celebrated as a pioneer and visionary-and who could argue?
Like many moguls, Sarnoff believed that his actions were justified. He hired the best engineers and took their word as to what was the best approach. Yes, he made enemies. Each man was known to appropriate ideas and technologies developed elsewhere, delaying their dissemination while his company tried to perfect them. But did consumers suffer because of this? And that leads us to the overarching parallel between these two eras. The government spent 28 years trying to rein in RCA, and has pursued the Microsoft matter for more than a decade already.
In both cases, the defendants used the intervening years to expand greatly the scope of their dominance. Which goes to show that the technology monopolist has one all-powerful force working to his advantage.
Not ingenuity or technological superiority. Not legal firepower. Farnsworth was a talented scientist and inventor from a young age. In , he unveiled a prototype of the first all-electric television, and went on to lead research in nuclear fusion. Despite his continued scientific success, Farnsworth was dogged by lawsuits and died, in debt, in Salt Lake City on March 11, An amateur scientist at a young age, Farnsworth converted his family's home appliances to electric power during his high school years and won a national contest with his original invention of a tamper-proof lock.
In his chemistry class in Rigby, Idaho, Farnsworth sketched out an idea for a vacuum tube that would revolutionize television — although neither his teacher nor his fellow students grasped the implications of his concept. Farnsworth continued his studies at Brigham Young University, where he matriculated in He was forced to drop out following the death of his father two years later.
His plans and experiments continued nonetheless. By , he was able to raise the funds to continue his scientific work and move to San Francisco with his new wife, Elma "Pem" Gardner Farnsworth. The following year, he unveiled his all-electronic television prototype—the first of its kind—made possible by a video camera tube or "image dissector.
Farnsworth rejected the first offer he received from RCA to purchase the rights to his device.
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