Top: A digital transmitter in Utah, USA

Middle: An early television receiver

Bottom: Philo and Alma Farnsworth with an early television camera



ALMA "PEM" FARNSWORTH DIES AGED 98


The co-inventor of television leaves us a legacy of danger



It was with sadness that I learnt of the death earlier this month of Alma “Pem” Farnsworth, the wife of Philo T Farnsworth who is universally credited with being the “father of television.” For this reason, I think that all of us who are or who have ever been influenced by “the goggle box”, “the idiot tube” and whatever other names television has picked up in its short career reflect what it has done to and for us.

Even as I write, Alexandra Palace, where the first BBC television broadcasts in the United Kingdom were made, is a few hundred yards away.

My argument is that television has taken over from the press, the radio and (even in the Islamic countries) from religion as the primary shaper of thought and attitude and, ultimately, behaviour in all societies that possess facilities for working television receivers.

At any rate, Alma "Pem" Farnsworth who helped her husband, Philo T. Farnsworth, invent the system for encoding pictures and sound together on radio waves which we know today as television died in Salt Lake City in May this year (2006) at the age of 98 years. Mrs Alma Farnsworth was one of the first people whose images were transmitted via television in 1927, when she was 19 years old. Alma Farnsworth, who married Philo in 1926, worked by her husband's side in his laboratories and fought for decades to assure his place in scientific history after his demise in 1971.

The first-ever television transmission took place on September 7, 1927, in Philo Farnsworth's San Francisco laboratory when the then 21-year-old inventor sent an image to a receiver in an adjoining room. The inventor later said that the inspiration for his breakthrough had come seven years earlier while he was ploughing a field on his family's farm in Idaho, USA. He visualized in his mind’s eye an image being scanned onto a cathode ray tube, at that time used only for oscilloscopes, in the same way that his field was being ploughed - row-by-row.

Alma subsequently recalled that morning in her husband’s laboratory "like it was yesterday” in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in 2002. "It was a very small screen, about the size of a postage stamp, an inch and a half square. At first, we were stunned. It was too good to be true. Then Phil said: “There you have it - electric television."

According to the book Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television by Donald G. Godfrey, "the first human images transmitted by Farnsworth were of his wife and her brother, Cliff Gardner. A 3 1/2-inch-square image of his wife with her eyes closed was transmitted on October 19, 1929, Donald Godfrey wrote. The book calls her “the first woman on TV.” As things turned out, credit for his pioneering work was almost taken from Philo Farnsworth when the conglomerate RCA under David Sarnoff, (with a potential profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars if they prevailed), claimed that the development was the work of one of its house engineers. Notwithstanding that, in 1935, the American legal system ruled that Philo Farnsworth was the true inventor.

As is the case with so many of mankind’s progress makers, Philo won little recognition or financial rewards in later years for his stupendous advance because of what some say was purposeful revenge by the then establishment for his courtroom defeat of David Sarnoff. Many broadcast historians have opted to cast the blame on David Sarnoff for setting back the development of FM radio for decades because it threatened domination of the AM networks and the AM receiver technology in which RCA had invested heavily, thereby causing the suicide of the inventor Edwin Armstrong who had invented FM radio in 1933. According to Donald Godfrey, Philo Farnsworth gave his wife credit as the co-inventor, saying: "my wife and I started this TV." Alma Farnsworth's 1990 autobiography, Distant Vision, tells the story of the battle between David Sarnoff and the man whose work so greatly influences nearly all of us today.

As I stated above, Alma Farnsworth’s death is the occasion for us to think about television and what it has done to us. I do not know whether or not the Farnsworths realised, during the early days, what a great influence TV would have on the general public, first in North America and Europe and then in almost all of the rest of the world.

It can be said firmly that the media as a whole influences thinking, emotion and consequently behaviour more than any other single entity – more than parents and educational systems, even.

After John Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, mankind became wide open to the influences of the printed word. At first the new technology was devoted to religion, especially the manufacturing of mass produced bibles but, as time rolled on, the uses of printing became more and more secular. By the 19th century, I think it can be safely said that newspapers were the primary source of day-to-day general information throughout the advanced world.

In 1901 the Italian physicist, Gugliemo Marconi , perfected a radio system that transmitted Morse code over the Atlantic Ocean. That was the start of the broadcast media.

After the second world war, the 1950s are remembered as “radio days” because the newness of radio and the many ideas it brought to the consciousnesses of ordinary people, separated by miles from other sources of news and entertainment, changed the climate of the culture of the western world and, ultimately, the whole planet.

When I studied journalism full time for a year in Leeds during the 1990s my broadcast journalism teacher, a young Iranian man, used to tell our class that it costs a great deal of capital to print and distribute a major newspaper widely and even more capital in the form of hundreds of millions of pounds to start up a television station but it only took a few hundred pounds and a few friends to establish a pirate (illegal) radio station. For that reason, he opined, if the working class ever revolts, the revolution would be directed by small mobile illegal radio stations.

In these days of declining newspaper sales most members of the general public learn the news of the world from the broadcast media – radio and television. Typically, a workingman will listen to the radio between rising and leaving his home for work in the morning and he settles down to watching “the telly” during the evening after work.

He will also watch TV during the weekends for hours on end.

Even more important, the television receiver vies successfully with the family and the school to be the primary influence on children’s minds. In the United Kingdom television ownership shot up for the coronation of 1953 and has been rising steadily ever since. It is now a rarity to find a home without a television receiver.

As stated above, it costs a great deal of capital and requires no small amount of social cooperation from “the powers” to establish and license a television station. Small time businessman can’t do that. If they are well to do, ordinary people can only aspire to buying a few shares in television companies – not the controlling interests.

At this time, control of television in the USA and throughout the world is concentrated in a few hands. For example, the biggest players seem to be:

Time Warner, 2003 turnover $39.5 billion, Disney 2003 turnover $27.1, Viacom 2003 turnover $26.5, NBC Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

There are some “independent” television studios such as: Spyglass, DreamWorks SKG and Columbia Pictures. However, I submit that these entities can survive in the harsh business climate only of they trim their sails to the “big boys” and give no effective opposition to the prevailing viewpoints.

The racist agitator Kevin Alfred Strom wants a media that is more slanted against us. Of the present day media establishment he complains:

“The mass media form for us our image of the world and then tell us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know - or think we know - about events outside our own neighbourhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, or our television.It is not just the heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories from our newspapers or the blatant propagandising of history-distorting TV "docudramas" that characterizes the opinion-manipulating techniques of the media masters. They exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in their management of the news and the entertainment that they present to us. For example, the way in which the news is covered: which items are emphasized and which are played down; the reporter's choice of words, tone of voice, and facial expressions; the wording of headlines; the choice of illustrations - all of these things subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear.”

Therefore, we will have to be on our guard about who controls the television broadcast media because it can be turned against us.

THE END

This article was first published on 11 May, 2006 in the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis, read all over the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic.