The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television » (First Perennial Edition)

To write THE LAST LONE INVENTOR, Evan I. Schwartz spent two years researching the life stories of Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff. He interviewed surviving Farnsworth family members, including Farnsworth's 93-year-old widow, and he visited document archives in six states.

As a journalist, Evan has been covering information technology for 15 years. He is a former editor at BusinessWeek, where he covered software and digital media and was part of teams that produced 12 cover stories and won a National Magazine Award and a Computer Press Award. In recent years, he has written for The New York Times, WIRED, and MIT's Technology Review.

Evan's first book, titled WEBONOMICS, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, has ranked as Amazon.com's #1 bestselling business book and was chosen as a finalist for two major awards: The Global Business Book Award as well as the Computer Press Award. International editions have been published in eight countries.

Evan's second book, DIGITAL DARWINISM, from the same publisher, also hit #1 on Amazon's business list shortly after its release, in June 1999. Now in its twelfth hardcover and first paperback printing in the U.S., it is available in the U.K., from Penguin, and has been translated into eight other languages. It too was named a finalist for the Computer Press Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Evan holds a B.S. in computer science from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and lives with his family in Brookline, Mass.

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"[T]he fascinating true story of the epic tussle between the Lone Inventor and the Mega-Mogul over the most influential invention of all time. This is a riveting American classic of independent brilliance versus corporate arrogance." -- James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers)

Publishers Weekly

For pop history chroniclers, the story of Philo T. Farnsworth is almost too good to be true. He conceived the idea of the television tube at age 14 in 1921, was quashed by David Sarnoff's RCA and died embittered, forgotten and with only a microscopic fraction of the wealth that the device generated for others. Schwartz (Digital Darwinism) sticks closely to this version of events, but the slant is justified. While there are other contenders to the title "Father of Television," Schwartz's cogent and elegant book persuasively argues Farnsworth's case and describes the heartbreak that defined his life. As Schwartz notes, Farnsworth "wholly underestimated what he was up against," i.e. corporate-controlled innovation. Patent law is at the heart of the book, as it both affords Farnsworth his crack at immortality and provided RCA with myriad legalistic stratagems to expand its monopoly. A number of patent rulings went in Farnsworth's favor, but that made remarkably little difference to RCA's eventual control of the medium. Given his adversary, Farnsworth's naïveté and some horrendous luck made his defeat virtually inevitable. Apparently intent on distorting the historical record to craft his own image for posterity, Sarnoff may one day be remembered -- thank in part to books like this -- primarily as the executive who crushed Farnsworth.