Philo T. Farnsworth & 100 Years of TV

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  In this week's episode, we meet Martha Rountree, the first woman to host a news and public affairs program on television an...

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  On December 27, 1947 a genial thirty-year-old man with wavy dark hair and a broad smile, wearing a fringed cowboy shirt and...

On the evening of May 7, 1947, RCA-made, Image Orthicon-powered  television cameras came to life at NBC’s Studio 9-H in Rockefeller Center — the same studio where, a decade earlier, Maestro Arturo Toscanini had made NBC a cultural force with live broadcasts of the NBC  Symphony⁠. ⁠1 The new show was called Kraft Television Theatre, and represented a turning point for the new medium in two respects...

After the 'false dawn' of 1939-1941, one of television's first steps out of its postwar crib was the telecast of the Joe Louis vs. Billy Conn heavyweight title fight on June 19, 1946. What makes the event noteworthy is not the fight itself (Louis knocked Conn out in the 8 th round to retain his title) but the camera tube that NBC used for the first time for this particular broadcast: the Image Ort...

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  Television was deemed ready for the public consumption with the adoption of signal standards in March, 1941 ( Countdown #92...

"It was a big goddammed deal!" For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  In this week's episode, commercial television finally arrives in the United States on July 1...

Despite RCA's plunge at the New York World's Fair in the spring of 1939, the FCC proceeded cautiously before setting signal standards for the U.S. television industry.   The National Television System Committee (NTSC) was formed in March 1940, and did not deliver a set of standards until March, 1941.  When the NTSC standards were finally settled, they adopted a standard 20% sharper than what RCA w...

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  In Countdown #93, we recount the first live telecasts of America's "National Pastime" in the summer of 1939 – a doubleheade...

If David Sarnoff can be recalled for any single ambition, it is his desire to be remembered as the man who singlehandedly delivered television unto the world.   Over more than a decade starting in the late 1920s, Sarnoff had spent an estimated $10 million of RCA's profits (that's roughly $240 million in 2025 dollars) on television research. By 1939, RCA's Board of Directors was starting to questio...

Despite the tremendous engineering strides made in the decade after its invention, by 1936 the commercial adoption of television in the United States remained mired in litigation between Farnsworth – who had invented it – and RCA's David Sarnoff – who wanted to control it.   There were no such impediments in the United Kingdom, where John Logie Baird started using the BBC radio airwaves for experi...

In addition to providing a showcase for Aryan Supremacy, Adolph Hitler's grand plan for the 1936 Berlin Olympics included demonstrating Nazi Germany's technical expertise with the first televised transmission of an international sporting event.   His grand designs fell short when two Americans – Jesse Owens and Philo T. Farnsworth - stole the show.  Chapters (00:00:00) - 100 Years of Television: C...

In 1930 – seven years after applying for his patent – Vladimir Zworykin visited Farnsworth's laboratory in San Francisco.   At the time, he was still employed by Westinghouse, and was given a three-day tour of Farnsworth's operations with the understanding that Westinghouse was considering taking a license for Farnsworth's patents.   When he was handed a freshly-fabricated Image Dissector tube, ev...

Television isn't just moving pictures that fly through the air. There is sound, too. And the clear, static-free audio we take for granted owes its existence to another of the electronics industry's unsung heroes: Edwin Howard Armstrong. Chapters (00:00:00) - We Should Have Laughed at Edison (00:00:21) - 100 Years of Television: Countdown to 2027 (00:01:29) - In the Elevator of Edwin Howard Armstro...

In the 1930s, video technology evolved rapidly in a world-wide race to deliver television to the marketplace.   In the United States, the principal contestants were the giant Radio Corporation of America and a tiny company spearheaded by the wunderkind inventor from Utah by way of San Francisco, Philo T. Farnsworth.   RCA had the capital, the technical resources, and the market clout to extend the...

For one hundred weeks that started in October, 2025 this podcast is going to recall the “Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.”  The Countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027 – the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.  The arrival of real (electronic) television was announced in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sept 3, 1928 - even as companie...

 To have the right idea and make it work is everything.   Meet Philo T. Farnsworth, the teenager who had the right idea and the young adult who made it work.     …While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, the summer of 1921 found Philo T. Farnsworth… strapped to a horse-drawn disc-harrow, cultivat...

In the last episode, we talked about cathode rays and radio waves.   But before this meandering journey through the history of science and technology can reach its destination — the actual inventing of television — physics itself has to make, quite literally, a quantum leap.

Today’s installment covers two more technologies needed to achieve real television. One is another step toward the electronic picture. The other redefines how those pictures would be sent and received. Chapters (00:00:00) - 100 Years of Television: Before 1927 (00:02:02) - The Years That Changed Television (00:11:42) - 100 Years of TV

Continuing our look back on the myriad observations, discoveries and inventions that preceded 1927. In the last episode, we talked about the evolution of electrical science in the 19 th century and the first advances in modern communications – the telegraph and the telephone – and the first discoveries and inventions around the interaction of light and electromagnetism.  In this episode we'll look...

Given the indispensable role that electricity plays in modern life, it's worth remembering: humans of some kind have roamed the Earth for hundreds of millennia, but have only mastered electromagnetism over the past two hundred years.   Across the one hundred years, numerous observations, discoveries and inventions brought science to the thresold of "moving pictures that can fly though the air.  In...

Before we can start the Countdown – and make the case that Philo T. Farnsworth invented television – we need to look back on the discoveries, speculations, false starts, and breakthroughs that finally came to fruition in San Francisco on September 7th, 1927. This episode of TV100 starts with Aristotle, who observed the phenomenon of "persistence of vision" that was first explore scientifically in...

To have right idea is one thing; to have the right idea and make it work is everything. --Roger Penrose  You've probably never hear of Philo T. Farnsworth.  Maybe it's time you did. We take our screen-based 2st century for granted, but the long-neglected fact is that every video screen on the planet can trace its origins to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922...