STORY OF THE BOY WHO INVENTED TELEVISION
The history and timeline for Philo’s Fusion story was taken from Mrs. Farnsworth’s book, Distant Vision, and I used her story because during our interview in the summer of 1993, the clarity of her mind and humble honesty was beyond question. That meeting was arranged by one of Philo’s relatives and after the relative introduced us to Mrs. Farnsworth, and her son Kent, The Waynedale News owner-editor (rls) sat at the kitchen table and interviewed Kent, while I sat in the living room with Mrs. Farnsworth and interviewed her. Pem signed a copy of her book Distant Vision, for me and although I’m a long-time resident of Fort Wayne, prior to meeting Philo’s relative in 1993, I’d never heard of the Farnsworth-ITT fusion project? After the initial meeting with Philo’s relative, it occurred to me something of great historical significance had occurred in Fort Wayne, IN and nobody seemed to know anything about it? Over the intervening years (1993-2004) I waited patiently to hear more about this fascinating and historical event, but it never happened? Some skeptics said, “Yeh, but he (Farnsworth) never achieved a sustained fusion reaction.” That’s like saying, “Yeh, but the Wright brothers only flew 150-feet at Kitty Hawk; the historical event was “first flight,” and not “sustained flight.” The events that happened on Pontiac Street between the years of 1959-1966 were a first, and although such an achievement would normally earn an inventor The Nobel Prize for physics, it passed into history with little mention; or of ever being recorded as a part of Fort Wayne’s history?
During that 1993 meeting with Mrs. Farnsworth I asked, “Were you ever an eye-witness to a fusion reaction at the Pontiac Street Lab?” Pem said, “Yes, late one night, Phil came home (corner of St. Joe Blvd. and State Street), got me out of bed, and had me dress in an overcoat, hat, and security badge. We drove to the Pontiac Street Lab where he took me past a security guard and into the fusion lab. Once inside, I sat on a stool with the monitored neutron counters while he operated the power supply. Pem said, “As Phil slowly increased the power level an ominous hum filled the room and then suddenly the neutron counters pegged and went completely off their top scale and stayed that way for quite some time after he shut the power off.” Phil said, “Pem, that’s all I wanted to see, let’s go home.” I will forever “suspect,” but never be able to “prove,” what Philo meant by his statement, “That’s all I needed to see.”
Since that 1993 meeting with Mrs. Farnsworth I have also interviewed three other impeccably honest eyewitnesses, who also testified to this historical event. Over an eight-year period and for a few million dollars (less than ten), Farnsworth and his fusion team achieved a higher neutron count and sustained a fusion reaction multiples of time longer than anybody else before or since. Yet, as the ever-increasing budgets for fission interests and magnetic confinement experiments increased, Farnsworth’s methodology has been ignored, but we cannot ignore the body count from fission related nuclear accidents or the evermore-accumulation of untold metric tons of toxic plutonium waste with a half-life of approximately twelve thousand years. “If,” Philo’s fusion device had succeeded it would have been a threat to oil company profits, and the profits of the manufacturers of gasoline and diesel engines and their related components, Con Edison’s conventional and fission power plants, and not to mention the ever ballooning AEC and NRC budgets, and the untold billions of dollars flowing into the budgets of PhD’s doing fission research at MIT, Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, etc. To be continued…
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