farnovision

Lucas Unveils Farnsworth Statue

Well, at least we know that Lucas knows about Farnsworth now:

Last Friday, as the new Clone Wars series made its long-awaited debut, a new bronze was quietly installed without ceremony at Lucasfilm’s Presidio campus, sculpted by long-time Star Wars fan Lawrence Noble. ...

The subject of the latest bronze is Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television. While it seems fitting that the inventor of television should be commemorated on the same day Clone Wars made its television debut, the timing was purely coincidental.

A pity we couldn't ever get close enough to Lucas to pitch him the Farnsworth movie.  Or maybe we did and he just thought it would make better statue than a motion picture.

"Flash of Genius" 2 - A Timely Reminder

The release of the new movie "Flash of Genius" has brought the subject of  How Inventors Always Get Screwed into the daily media diet.

BTW, if you don't know about Armstrong, you should read Lawrence Lessing's (he's not the Internet Lessig) 1956 biography, "Man of High Fidelity." The book is sadly out of print (old paperback copies are selling for $25.00 on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN)). ortunately, though, the complete text of the book has been posted here by the Internet Archive...

Anyway, if you think American technological prowess begins and ends with the Mac and iPhone, you owe it to yourself to read this tale of a true genius struggling against those out to steal the fruits of his brilliance. In Armstrong's case, his nemesis was RCA impresario David Sarnoff....

RCA -- along with Westinghouse and a host of other companies -- infringed Amstrong's patents for years. He was less lucky than Kearns, though. He committed suicide by walking out of a hotel window in 1954...

The point I want to make is that people who think modern technology sprung fully realized in some easy and fun way from the landscaped corporate vistas of Silicon Valley don't know squat. Every development from Maxwell, Edison, and Tesla; up through Marconi and De Forest; to Eckert, Mauchly and the present day has not come without a humongous struggle. (For another great tale of inventor screwing -- tellingly, also involving RCA -- read Tube: The Invention of Television by David Fisher, about the travails of Philo Farnsworth.)

 

The importance of this topic in the current scenario cannot be over-stated.  Our leaders keep telling us that we're going to innovate our way out of the current energy / economic / environmental crises.  Maybe somebody needs to remind our leaders what really happens to the individuals who produce the innovations we're counting on to reshape the world.

If they really want to "transform America" (as one of the major party candidates stated upon launching his campaign), then they need to take a long hard look at how individual genius suffers in a world dominated by monolithic corporate capitalism.

For People With Too Much Time On Their Hands

I don't know if that means the people who MAKE videos like this, or the people (like me) who watch them.  But here's one of my favorite Monty Python scenes, updated for the modern era:

What are you going to do, bleed on me?  But... wouldn't the light-sable cauterize the wounds?