The Boy Who Invented Television: A Story of Inspiration, Persistence and Quiet Passion »

Paul Schatzkin has been researching the story of television's forgotten inventor for more than 25 years. He first encountered the subject while serving as a videotape editor on the ABC-TV comedy series Barney Miller, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. His clear and entertaining writing style gives readers of all ages a new insight into the technology that shapes our daily lives.

While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, Philo T. Farnsworth, age 14, dreamed of trapping light in an empty jar and transmitting it, one line at a time, on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons.

Farnsworth was a farm boy from Rigby, Idaho, with virtually no knowledge of electronics when he first sketched his idea for electronic television on a blackboard for his high school science teacher. Fifteen years later, his teacher would recreate that sketch as part of his testimony in patent litigation between Farnsworth and the giant Radio Corporation of America.

In 1930, Farnsworth was awarded the fundamental patents for modern television; but he had to spend the next decade fighting off challenges to his patents by the giant Radio Corporation of America and defending his vision against his own shortsighted investors who did not share his larger dream of scientific independence.

The Boy Who Invented Television traces Farnsworth's guided tour of discovery, describing the observations he made in the course of developing and improving his initial invention and revealing how his unique insights brought him to the threshold of what could have been an even greater discovery-clean, safe, and unlimited energy from controlled nuclear fusion.

Wired Magazine

Paul Schatzkin's biography of Philo T. Farnsworth puts anything actually on the tube to shame.