Philo Farnsworth Finally Gets His Due

For decades, the real inventor of TV -- Philo Farnsworth -- didn't get much attention. Farnsworth just didn't have the P.R. machine to challenge RCA's David Sarnoff for the claim. As a result, Farnsworth was virtually anonymous when he died.

Big Action's Chris Farnsworth grew up with tales of his great-uncle, and notes that only today is Philo finally getting recognized.

That includes a front-and-center role in the Aaron Sorkin-penned play "The Farnsworth Invention," which is currently being workshopped at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Chris headed down to La Jolla to check out the play first hand, and as he writes at Big Action, he was pleased:

Philo, for those who haven't been bored by tales of my family lore yet, was my great-uncle. And it's not just family pride that makes me say this: he was another order of intellect. At 12, he invented an ignition-key system for automobiles as part of a national contest. At 14, while plowing a field, he came up with the idea that would define his life. He invented a method for broadcasting images over radio waves -- something he called "television."

In 1927, he broadcast the first ever electronic television image. And for the next decade, he was locked in a battle with RCA and its president, David Sarnoff, who insisted they had invented television -- and waged a multi-million dollar campaign against him, back when a million dollars was real money. The fact that RCA's device never worked was a small detail. (As Sorkin has Sarnoff say in the play: "We invented television -- it just doesn't work yet.")

In 1971, Philo died, broke and in obscurity, while the credit for his invention went to other people. Only today is the record finally being set straight.

I grew up with my grandfather's stories of his brother's struggle with RCA and Sarnoff. It shouldn't be any surprise that I loved the play. On a purely personal level, it was amazing to watch scenes played out as I'd heard them described, years ago. Aaron Sorkin and the director, Des McAnuff, were incredibly kind and gracious to us, as were the entire cast and crew. Even though they were all busy with the rush of opening night, they took the time to talk to us (and listen to me babble incomprehensibly about just how really, really cool this was).

But on a purely dramatic level, the play shows the battle in amazing color and detail, covering the birth of the 20th Century through the attempt to control what would be its most important invention...

My biases are obvious, and there's no question as to who really invented television in my mind, or in the play as it's written now. Sarnoff the character says at one point, without Philo, "Everyone else was just spinning pinwheels" -- a reference to the attempts, before Philo, to come up with a mechanical TV system...

Whatever his original intentions, Sarnoff was the one who turned TV into the cash-machine we know today, installed in everyone's home, making billions of dollars out of literal thin air.

Don't get me wrong: Philo deserves the credit for the invention. A court agreed, and RCA was forced to pay Philo a million dollars in royalties -- even as it tried to change history to say otherwise.

Without Philo, we never would have had television. But it's because of Sarnoff, for better or worse, that we have what we now call TV...

The play continues through March 25 -- Call 858-550-1010. By the way, I forgot to originally add that according to Variety, the play could soon be Broadway-bound.