farnovision

The First "Review"

Link: Big Action!: The Farnsworth Invention.

The LaJolla Playhouse, which is presenting Aaron Sorkin's play, The Farnsworth Invention until March 2, asks that this "page to stage" workshop production not be formally reviewed in the press.  However, that doesn't mean that people who see the play can't post their comments and observations to their blogs. 

This post  from distant relation and Hollywood writer Chris Farnsworth gives us our first "stage to page" assessment of the play, and it sounds like something is going right out there in San Diego. 

Early Television Convention (2003 Promo)

I recently posted an item here about the Early Television Museum in Hilliard, Ohio. This morning somebody sent me a link to this clip of footage from a convention and swap meet at the Museum in 2003. Interesting stuff... a rapid fire look at "pre-historic" television. See www.earlytelevision.org for more information. A DVD video of the full five hours of the convention procedings is available from the museum.

David Sarnoff and the "American Way"

Harold Evans is the author of a pretty good (i.e. mostly accurate) account of the history of invention in America, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators.  He wrote this column for the Wall Street Journal last week, which includes this assessment of the contributions of a certain David Sarnoff to the annals of innovation:

An entrepreneur may be the enemy of innovation. David Sarnoff, the black-belt bureaucrat who headed RCA, was a classic entrepreneur, but he was the relentless and unscrupulous enemy of innovation in the introduction of FM radio. He was heavily invested in making AM radios and broadcasting AM through RCA's National Broadcasting Corporation. So he did his best to sabotage the astoundingly brilliant Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954), inventor of FM, even though he had the right of first refusal of Armstrong's invention.

Postwar, Sarnoff became a genuine promoter of innovation in pioneering a system of color TV compatible with black and white, defeating the non-compatible electromechanical system pushed by Bill Paley of CBS. But Sarnoff, entrepreneur, also did to Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), the inventor and innovator of electronic television, what he had done to Armstrong. In the end he had to pay Farnsworth for his groundbreaking patent but then had the gall to claim the credit he did not deserve as "the father" of television. He was certainly an innovator in the creation of a number of myths about himself: Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century issue (in 2000) still credited him as the innovator of both radio and television.

 

Generally speaking, articles from the Wall Street Journal are only available online to subscribers, so thanks to blogger  Jose Maria Arrunategui for making this text available.  At least, until the WSJ catches up with him....

Almost Ready for Prime Time?

Link: Aaron Sorkin: The Father of 'Invention'.

On Tuesday, the La Jolla Playhouse will open its workshop production of “The Farnsworth Invention,” Sorkin's first new play since “A Few Good Men” premiered on Broadway 18 years ago.

With 17 actors playing 100 roles, Sorkin's sweeping work about the birth of television may be one of the most ambitious creations of his high-achieving career. But on a day that started with “Studio 60” business in Burbank and would end many hours later with “Farnsworth” rewrites in his San Diego hotel room, the freakiest thing about Sorkin was his refusal to freak out.

 

Reading this account of the pending production, one wonders if Aaron Sorkin isn't about to be come the "David Sarnoff" in the telling of the Philo Farnsworth story -- since once again the Farnsworth family and others have been pushed aside for the sake of a big-business production.   

There is a discussion of Aaron Sorkin's work (mostly "Studio 60") at livejournal.com

Inventor of the Couch Potato Dies

Link: Inventor of the TV Remote dies

Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Article Tools

Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday

Meet The Weepies

Let's call this the "FarnoVideo of the Week." It's a video featuring music by a duo called "The Weepies" that we think rather highly of.  The tune is called "Nobody Knows Me At All." 

The video was produced by Ashli Cole and Zac Benjamin, a couple that goes by the combined name of   "Shlizak"  Congratulations, Ashli & Zac, and The Weepies, for being named the first "FarnoVideo of the Week!"    I'm sure Philo would be proud. 

Baird -v- Farnsworth - AGAIN

I used to get an e-mail from somebody like every other week reminding me that John Logie Baird demonstrated a mechanical television system in 1926, and that he should be therefore regarded as the "inventor of television."  But until this morning It had been so long since I'd gotten one, I thought maybe the Baird crowd had finally seen the light (as it were).  So imagine my surprise when this showed up in my e-mail this morning:

- - - - -

From: "Bernard V. de Lara"
Subject: just a few questions

Dear Paul :

 

I'm not American but just someone writing to you from France.  I was wondering : convincing though you are about Philo being the real inventor of television, I found this British website that seems even more convincing about Baird being the real inventor of television. I'm really honest in trying to find the truth, but how do you account for the following excerpts ?

— The man behind the demonstration was a 37-year-old Scotsman called John Logie Baird. And what he showed on screen, 19 months before Farnsworth, was far superior to  Farnsworth’s "blob of light", as it was famously described by Albert Abramson in The History
of Television.

— When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the camera used to transmit the live pictures was based on Baird’s Field Sequential Colour System, because this was the best and most reliable available.

— Virtually nothing of Farnsworth’s technology is delivered to our living rooms today.

 

Those were taken from the following site:

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/john_logie_baird.htm

 

Thanks for any answer you can provide me with.

Bernard

- - - -

To which I have replied:

Dear Bernard:

As the website you mention points out, Baird's system was mechanical.  It was obsolete the moment it was demonstrated.  Saying Baird invented television is sorta like saying that the first guy who hooked a horse up to a cart invented the motor car.   Or that the first person who put a match to a candle invented the light-bulb.

Farnsworth's contribution was seminal:  it removed all the mechanical contrivances, and demonstrated a mastery of quantum physics previously unknown.  I like to call it "the leap from parts to particles."   I find Abramson's assessment of a "blob of light" particularly laughable.  That "blob of light" proved a principal, and had Abramson's own patrons -- Zworykin, RCA -- clamoring for the patent rights to that principal. 

Now This is COOL

No word yet on when this will be available at CompUSA, but I sure want one.

New Video - "50 Years Later"

A new video has been added to the FarnoVideos Library:

Here we see Cliff Gardner building the replica of the Image Dissector tube that was used in the "Golden Anniversary" celebration in 1977.  Cliff, who was Philo Farnsworth's brother in law (Pem's brother), was the self-taught glass blower who built all the tubes that were fabricated in the Farnsworth labs in the 1920s and early 30s.  Despite being 50 years later, the equipment like the spot welder and glass lathe, and the assembly steps that Cliff is seen taking here, are virtually identical to the equipment and processes used in the 1920s. 

Incidentally, Aaron Sorkin, whose play The Farnsworth Invention opens in San Diego, CA later this month, also  wrote about Cliff and Philo in an episode of his comedy, "Sports Night" called "Cliff Gardner" back in 1999.   

Meet Hugo Gernsback

I am often asked, where did the term "television" actually come from.  There are numerous accounts of the origin of the term.  One of them attributes its first use to the writings of one Hugo Gernsback, who published numerous magazines about science and invention during the early 20th century.  I recall the first time I heard Gernsback's name was in the company of Philo Farnsworth III (eldest son of the TV inventor) who told me back in the 1970s that his father likely learned of the idea of "pictures that could fly through the air" from reading one of Gernsback's early publications.   

In addition to publishing magazines devoted to science and electronics, Gernsback also wrote some of the earliest works of what is now known as "science fiction," including the popular "Amazing Stories" series.  If you have ever heard of the "Hugo Awards" for science fiction writing, then you will be  interested to learn that they were named for .... Hugo Gernsback.