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Philo Farnsworth, the American West and the Power of Television
Dear Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
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With that out of the way, we’ll dive right in.
-Matt Farwell
Philo T. Farnsworth, the Beaver, Utah born Mormon “father of television” received his first vision at fourteen while plowing potato fields on the family farm in Rigby, Idaho.
The sunlight in the high desert sun through the long straight furrows inspired an idea: what if the furrows were not made of dirt, but were in fact parallel rows of light that could be transmitted through radio waves.
“Capturing light in a bottle” was the phrase used to describe Farnsworth’s idea that he sketched out the idea to a science teacher at Rigby High School on a series of blackboards.
A friend of his once commented that Philo, at the age of 14, dreamed of trapping light in an empty jar, from which it could be transmitted. Philo was never that naive or simplistic.
It is more accurate to say that at the age of 14, he dreamed of using a lens to direct light into a glass camera tube, where it could be analyzed in a magnetically deflected beam of electrons, dissected and transmitted one line at a time in a continuous stream. And he would have had an even more accurate description.
In 1923, the Farnsworth family moved to Provo, Utah and Philo graduated from Brigham Young High School in 1924, just months after his fifty-eight year old father’s death from pneumonia. He scored the second highest in the nation on the Naval Academy’s recruiting tests but was still thinking about the potato field vision, so after learning that the government would own any patents he filed while in the military, Farnsworth decided to apply for a hardship discharge as the eldest son in a fatherless family.
Back in Utah, Philo enrolled at Brigham Young University, met his wife Pem, and by 1927 he produced the first electronic television transmission, transmitting the image of a carbon-smoked glass slide with a single line scratched in. In 1930, Farnsworth produced the first all-electronic television image—Pem Farnsworth—but the camera was so hot she could only sit for the image for a brief period before turning away.
Farnsworth filed Patent #1,773,980 for his camera tube, entitled Television System, on January 7, 1927 and was granted the patent on August 25, 1930, after a long battle with corporate giants.
A second patent was needed to begin the whole television story; Patent #1,773,981 which he obtained for the cathode ray tube (CRT) providing the display tube—the receiver—the television screen.
Farnsworth was an optimist. According to his wife Pem, he saw television “as a marvelous teaching tool. There would be no excuse of illiteracy. Parents could learn along with their children. News and sporting events could be seen as they were happening. Symphonies would mean more when one could see the musicians as they played, and movies would be seen in our own living rooms. He said there would be a time when we would be able to see and learn about people in other lands. If we understood them better, differences could be settled around conference tables, without going to war.”
I hope at this point you’re starting to notice the similarities.
There’s some similarities here to the way the Silicon Valley sorcerer hucksters pitched their products, from shopping and putting radio on the internet to social media to the current push about how artificial intelligence will change everything.
Philo, I think, really believed this when he invented television.
His son Kent said, "I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives. Throughout my childhood his reaction to television was, 'There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet."
We see that with a lot of the tech crew now, who refuse to get their own children a smartphone despite making a lot of money by addicting other people’s children to screens, yet kept selling about the peacemaking capacities of social media or the possibility for a second Renaissance provided by artificial intelligence? I have to think it is all technobabble.
The electronic shackles—wearable fitness trackers, iPhones, electric cars that double as surveillance devices that can be repurposed as vehicular explosive devices by remotely overclocking the battery—are so comfortable now we barely even notice them. License plate scanners, surveillance cameras, IMSI catchers, electronic health record surveillance. You’re trapped in the net, whether you agreed to it or not.
That net was woven in deserts out west—Farnsworth’s television was one of the key nodes of that for a long time. The Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb, and the later invention of the internet (which, in its own way, is a fusion of Farnsworth’s vision with the realities of the new nuclear world The Trinity Test ushered in, a whole bunch of peer to peer text televisions assembled in a node so as to survive a nuclear attack ) is the only more significant invention in the twentieth century.
John Grombach’s work on radio as a weapon in the 1920’s is readily applicable to the weaponization of television.
The Saga of Sock I
Over the past couple years, I’ve developed a fascination with two American Spy Viceroys from the 1940’s & 1950’s—Frank Gardiner Wisner and John V “Frenchy” Grombach. Both of them headed intelligence agencies you’ve probably never heard of; OSS veteran Wisner ran the Office of Policy Coordination, a sort of proto-CIA operations directorate in the days before CIA (and indeed went on to run CIA’s plans directorate), while Grombach ran the Army’s crown jewel intelligence organization called “The Pond”—an ultra secret Army shop set up by the the man the Army considered God’s own representative on earth, General George Catlett Marshall, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia and the Chief of Staff of the Army.
If you’re a long time reader of The Hunt for Tom Clancy, you might recall Rigby, Idaho. It’s where I went to watch the great American eclipse.
Over the last month, as I traveled from Virginia back to Arkansas, I stopped in and saw a lot of old friends, and the parents of a lot of old friends. Most of the parents were born shortly after the invention of television and the atomic bomb, and I started to think about the power that the TV held in their lives.
I wasn’t the only one who ever thought about this. Here’s a CIA document from the mid-1950’s showing how they were thinking about it.
Many of the old friends—who by now are old people—were upset about politics, all worked up about Trump the same way really religious people get worked up about heathens. These are, for the most part, people who spent their lives working for the government in the military or intelligence services and leaned very conservative when I was growing up around them. They’re retired now and watch a lot of TV. I don’t watch all that much TV, and so I’m literally not tuned to the same anger frequencies they are, and it began to be a bit jarring, having the same conversation time and time again, when I’m not able to muster up the same anger.
Then, as I drove back to Arkansas, I stayed in some hotels and motels with Television and noticed when I put on the Cable News stations how viscerally my body reacted; I could feel my blood pressure rise as the very attractive hosts grew very heated over this issue or that, and I realized (perhaps not for the first time) that in Philo Farnsworth’s furrows of light, seeds of darkness were planted and they have grown in, strong, bearing only bitter fruit.
Kill your TV.
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Thank you so much for reading.
This rocks man I love this