How to Invent an Industry
Why is it that the inventor of the light bulb, the telephone, and the radio are all household names, but the inventor of the thing that (until relatively recently) we spent the most time staring at — the television — is not remotely as well known?
Applying Occam’s Razor to this question, we are left with the answer: because aliens bestowed this technology on human beings.
In the movie Men In Black, Tommy Lee Jones explains to a young Will Smith that their organization is funded by their ownership of patents on technology seized by aliens over the years, including Velcro, liposuction, and the microwave. At some point in the years since I first saw that movie, I added television to that list. I recall my physics teacher explaining the basic idea in high school: a beam of electrons gets shot out of a cathode ray tube and onto a phosphorescent screen. Et voila, we all get to watch Family Matters on Friday nights.
Only, this seems too bizarre. For one thing, the origins of the television go back to the 1920s. Which is, in itself, difficult to believe. The first scheduled radio broadcast was only transmitted in 1920, and the first professional baseball game transmitted via radio was in 1921! It’s incredible to think that the first public television broadcast was in 1928.
For another thing, as we all know, television is not a single tiny point of light on a screen — it’s whole pictures featuring people, animals, and cars all doing crazy things like bumping into one another. How could technology from the 1920s possibly build up to the level of sophistication to make it possible to watch something like the chase scene in Bullitt?
If you’re not familiar with how the original cathode ray tube televisions worked, here’s the quick and dirty version:
- A television camera converts an image into a series of electrical impulses, which can then be transmitted to the rest of the world (let’s say wirelessly, by way of a broadcast antenna, which is the way it worked prior to cable and satellite).
- The antenna transmits a signal to homes across a region.
- Your house (which also may have had an antenna) is bombarded by the signal — but the only thing in the house that knows about it is the television.
- The television’s receiver decodes the signal into instructions to the electron beam in the cathode ray tube.
- These instructions tell the beam exactly how bright or dark (or what color) to make individual pixels of light on line after line of the screen, thus reconstructing the image picked up by the television. By precisely controlling the electrical current flowing to an electro-magnet that surrounds the tube, the system controls how the electron beam moves across the screen, which is actually a phosphorescent surface that lights up when it’s hit by electrons.
- By re-constructing the image many times per second, the television is able to create the illusion that you’re seeing a complete moving image of, say, Gilligan getting hit on the head by a coconut.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan describes the bombardment of the screen with electrons in lyric terms: “The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture. The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver. From these he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image.”
Exactly who invented the first television is a little murky, but there is no doubt that one of the foremost pioneers was a young Mormon kid with the unlikely name of Philo Farnsworth. It’s peculiar that this is not common knowledge, since Farnsworth has the kind of biography Americans love: he was born in 1906 and raised on a farm in Utah. Until he was 12, Philo Farnsworth didn’t live in a home that had electricity, let alone an “electronics lab” or anything else you’d think a young inventor would have. What he did have was an agile mind and a devouring curiosity. Once he was exposed to electricity and whatever passed for modern conveniences in 1918, he needed to know how it all worked. By the time Farnsworth was 24, he had a patent for an electronic television.
It goes without saying that even an individual with a real gift for inventing basically impossible things doesn’t come up with the idea out of nothing. There were a few critical pieces in place already, but it is still astonishing to think of a teenager assembling these pieces and adding a few new ideas to create a whole industry.
One of the things that made Farnsworth’s invention possible was the fact that the question of how to transmit images was already out there in the world. Also, critically, the idea of breaking the image down into electrical impulses had actually been figured out decades before. In the 1880s, a young German inventor came up with the idea of using a spinning disk with holes in it to “scan” an image. He didn’t really try it out, but others picked up his idea, notably Scottish inventor John Logie Baird. Baird figured out how to use these disks to transmit images in the 1920s, just in time to be completely overshadowed by Farnsworth’s electronic television.
Also, Farnsworth did not have to invent the cathode ray tube, which was a necessary component. And, critically, information about vacuum tubes and electronics was accessible, with a little effort. I have a 1911 copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and its entry on vacuum tubes is thousands of words long and contains plenty of technical details. The vacuum tube was basically as exciting in the early 20th century as artificial intelligence is today, and plenty was being written about it. Farnsworth would have had access to this kind of information, as well as the electronics magazines of the day, which he reportedly consumed ravenously.
In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the variables in what you might think of as a kind of “formula” for creativity: they are a “domain” (which is to say, an organized and structured field of study), a “field” (which he describes as the experts who know the domain), and the individual. As Csikszentmihalyi observes, “the trait of personal creativity may help generate the novelty that will change a domain, but it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for it.”
In other words, the environment has to be right for innovation. A few key elements that need to be in place, according to Csikszentmihalyi, are:
- Enough structure in a domain that there are rules and principles, as well as a body of knowledge, that can be absorbed by a new initiate.
- A set of experts who are there to recognize and legitimize novel contributions. Without a group of people to interact with — rigid defenders of orthodoxy though they be — the creative individual’s contribution is likely to fall into a vacuum.
- A willingness on the part of someone to invest in new ideas, which may or may not bear fruit.
- An individual who is both curious and doggedly determined to succeed.
In Farnsworth’s case, you have just the right brew of ingredients: the body of knowledge was developing, the questions were being asked, the experts were out there, and there was money to be made. Even though Farnsworth was in his 20s, his ideas and experiments were so convincing that he was able to line up investors, develop prototypes, and register patents.
Unfortunately, Farnsworth got tangled up in a legal battle with RCA over who actually invented television — RCA had tried to buy Farnsworth out, but he turned them down. So they did the next best thing: come up with their own brilliant inventor, a Russian named Vladimir Zworkyin, who had also been tinkering around with cathode ray tubes and could legitimately claim to be one of the pioneers in the field. (A Japanese inventor named Kenjiro Takayanagi also figured out that you could use tubes to transmit images and also built a working television receiver in the 1920s, but he did not try to file a patent for it.)
You would think that a guy on the forefront of the technology of his time like Farnsworth would go on to invent many other things and die rich and happy, sitting on a pile of patents. And you’d be half right — he was a pioneer in radar technology, the infrared telescope, and he worked on nuclear fusion at Brigham Young University in the 60s. But he seems to have had trouble remaining financially solvent, and he died in debt in the early 1970s.
In a case of the monster turning on its maker, Farnsworth appeared on the television game show I’ve Got a Secret in the late 1950s. This was a show where a panel of celebrities (or quasi-celebrities) had to ask the player a series of questions to learn their secret — in Farnsworth’s case (since, naturally, no one recognizes him), that he invented television. In the course of things, Farnsworth is asked if his invention has been “a blessing to mankind”. He responds: “I think generally speaking, it has been a blessing, yes.” But, bear in mind, this was decades before anyone thought of making Jersey Shore, so perhaps he can be forgiven.
