Episode Details

Paul Schatzkin is the author of two books that George Howard considers among the most important and least known in the alternative science space - The Boy Who Invented Television and The Man Who Mastered Gravity. This episode focuses primarily on the first, marking the 100th anniversary of the invention that became the most ubiquitous technology on the planet, but the conversation inevitably extends into the deeper and more troubling story of what Philo Farnsworth did after television was finished with him.

The origin story of television is extraordinary precisely because it has been almost entirely lost. Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906 to a Mormon farming family in Beaver, Utah, grew up on the frontier without electricity, and by the age of twelve was repairing the Delco generator on his family's Idaho homestead better than any adult could. He was a native of Einstein's universe - born the year after the 1905 papers, he grew up treating relativity and quantum mechanics as background reality rather than revolutionary novelty. In the summer of 1921, plowing a field under the Idaho sun at age fourteen, he looked back at the parallel rows he had carved and in that moment understood how to create an electrical counterpart to an optical image and scan it one line at a time on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons. He drew the concept on a chalkboard for his high school science teacher in 1922. He demonstrated the first working all-electronic television in 1927. The sketch and the working tube are essentially the same device. Every screen on Earth traces its lineage to that field in Idaho.

The reason Farnsworth's name is not as universally known as Edison or the Wright Brothers comes down to three factors Paul identifies with precision. Farnsworth himself was constitutionally uninterested in his past achievements and had moved on from television by the late 1930s. Numerous pretenders - most significantly David Sarnoff's RCA, whose engineers reverse-engineered Farnsworth's patents after a young engineer named Vladimir Zworykin visited his laboratory under the pretence of collaboration - spent decades attempting to claim the invention. And when Farnsworth Television and Radio was acquired by ITT in 1949 for pennies on the dollar, the institutional memory of the invention's true origin was extinguished with it.

The deeper story is what Farnsworth turned his attention to after television. Declining an invitation to participate in the Manhattan Project in 1941 - telling his wife he believed they were building an atomic bomb and wanted no part of it - he spent the war in his private laboratory in Maine, working at the quantum level on problems that only he fully understood. A chance encounter in 1948 led to a phone call with Albert Einstein, in which Farnsworth described his nascent ideas about nuclear fusion. Einstein, despondent since Hiroshima and Nagasaki about what his theories had been used for, told Farnsworth these are the good parts of my theories - you must continue this work. In 1953, on a drive through the Utah desert, Farnsworth had the conception for inertial electrostatic confinement - a fusion approach using a reactor the size of a softball rather than a gymnasium, requiring no superconducting magnets or incomprehensible engineering complexity. He spent six years doing the mathematics before building anything. The machines produced neutron fluxes on the order of 100 billion neutrons per second - proof of fusion. A portable demonstration unit was wheeled into an Atomic Energy Commission meeting in Washington and plugged into a wall. The institutional response was not excitement. It was a room full of people representing vested interests in existing plasma physics programmes, and a chairman who leaned back and asked whose budget was this going to come out of.

Farnsworth died in 1971. A journal discovered after his death had seven pages torn out. His widow's note on t