Philo T. Farnsworth the inventor of television, came to deeply regret what he had wrought, as he grew old watching television fail to bring high culture and education to the masses, and instead portray what he felt was depravity and vice.
Farnsworth was a farm boy from Idaho who was plowing a field in 1920, at the age of thirteen. With no training in physics whatsoever, merely from reading a Sears & Roebuck catalog he suddenly had a vision. He saw in the parallel rows of the field a way of distributing electrons on the screen of an electronic tube. This would create pictures to go along with radio --- something called television. Such was life in rural America eighty years ago.
The story of Farnsworth is the usual one of a genius with a daffy idea which turns out not to be so daffy. And, too, according to the script, as he works with limited capital and nothing but belief in his ideas, he gets close to success, and then suddenly finds himself getting screwed on all fronts by the financial operators who really run the U. S.
In this case, the royal screwing came from the operator of operators, Dave Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America. This was the man who single-handedly snatched up the patents and finally drove the inventor of FM --- the powerful and brilliant Edwin Howard Armstrong --- into despair and ultimate suicide. For Sarnoff, to do in Philo T. Farnsworth was small potatoes.
