STORY OF THE BOY WHO INVENTED TELEVISION
This week’s Farnsworth story is one that I heard in 1993 shortly after meeting Mrs. Farnsworth and obtaining a signed copy of her book, Distant Vision. Pem’s book was written just over a decade ago, but it’s already a collector’s item, and a well-used, unsigned copy is currently selling for about fifty dollars. I took my copy to Jack F. Stark to get his electrical engineer’s opinion about its content. Jack read the cover of Distant Vision, and saw a sentence under its title that read, The Life of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, “Father of Television,” and that made him smile. Jack said, “Yes, I knew Mr. Farnsworth; he was a brilliant inventor who I met on several occasions. I’ll never forget the first time I met him, it was late in 1950, I was at my Spy Run office at Indiana and Michigan when the phone rang and my secretary said it was an irate City Light Manager who was calling to complain about one of our customers. The customer in question turned out to be none other than Philo T. Farnsworth and the City Light Manager bitterly complained that Farnsworth was doing something inside his home that was causing his customers lights to go bright and dim. Jack told the City Light Manager that Farnsworth’s house (at the corner of St. Joe Blvd. and State Street), was their only customer East of the St. Joe River and that he was on two separate 240-volt lines that connected his house to Indiana & Michigan’s Spy Run substation and since he was on a totally separate power grid from City Light customers it was highly unlikely that he (Farnsworth) could be doing anything to cause their surge problems. Jack’s separate line and power grid theory did little to quite the irate manager who declared the next time his customers complained he was going to send a crew out and disconnect Farnsworth’s electricity and see if that didn’t fix their problem? Jack said, “Farnsworth’s shut off box is on I & M’s property and your crew does not have a right to trespass without our permission, but I will go to the Farnsworth house tonight after I leave the office, and personally investigate this matter. That evening, Jack went to the Farnsworth house and knocked on their front door, and when Philo answered it, he (Jack) introduced himself, and explained why he was there. Philo laughed out loud, and then invited Jack into their home for a grand tour of his upstairs electronics laboratory. Farnsworth’s current project involved converting electrical energy into microwaves, and transmitting them from the top of a downtown Fort Wayne building, to the roof of his house where he was re-capturing them in dish antennae and converting them back into electrical energy. Philo’s idea was to use a microwave tower to send wireless electrical power to vehicles powered by electric motors thus eliminating the heavy batteries then used to propel electric cars and trucks. Although Philo was not aware of the electrical surge problems he was causing his neighbors, he knew in an instant after Jack explained their problem that it was most likely caused by City Light’s pole lines picking up his stray microwave energy. Before Jack left the Farnsworth home he invited Philo to speak before the Fort Wayne Quest Club and during that speech Philo announced to his audience that if today’s power companies built any more fission plants, or fossil fuel plants they were insane because he (Philo) could generate enough electricity to run Fort Wayne, IN until hell froze over on less than five dollars worth of hydrogen fuel! After Jack finished reading the book, I asked him if he believed Farnsworth had achieved a sustained nuclear fusion reaction with his electronic inertial containment vacuum tube, and after a lengthy pause he said, “Yes.”
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