Case Study: Philo and Elma Farnsworth

Philo and Elma Farnsworth

A biography of the American inventor of “the first complete electronic television system,” Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), was written by the inventor’s widow, Elma G. Farnsworth (1908-2006) and is entitled Distant Vision; Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier (1990). 

Philo's work was always the priority throughout their lives.  The book relates how specific events made it possible for Philo to invent electronic television from transmitter to receiver.  After his passing, Elma was able to provide a detailed account of her husband's research and inventions as well as their life together.  The case expands the meaning and implications of thought processes associated with the concept of 'channeling' or what is here described as 'distant vision.'

Phil's concept of using electrons to eliminate all moving parts from both the transmitter and receiver in his television system was a brilliant display of his genius: by intuitive thinking, logic, and hard work, he combined seemingly unrelated elements into new instruments of amazing effectiveness.

The book’s unexpected prologue recounted a “sacred experience” where prior to the birth of Philo, his father was on the way to the corral to milk the cows when he heard a voice call his name.  He turned to see his late wife, Amelia, who delivered a message concerning his new wife, Serena: “I have come to tell you that Serena’s child is one of God’s special spirits; great care should be taken in his upbringing.”  Amelia then faded from sight.

Elma and her husband were people of faith, attending the Mormon church.  Their adversities in life were similar to everyone’s — business disappointments, the death of a one-year-old son from strep infection, the loss of a home and lab by forest fire, periods of illness.

The question is often asked, “How could a fourteen-year-old farm boy ever devise something so technically complex as television?”  As improbable as it seems, young Philo Farnsworth not only proved it was possible, but he did it.  How could that happen?  Was it a matter of early motivation and circumstance, or, as Phil said, was there a certain amount of guidance from a higher intelligence, even God?  Phil often referred to the sequence of events that constituted our  lives as a “guided tour.”  Phil’s inventiveness was characterized by a series of inspirations that moved him toward some distant vision.

Elma related that the first indication that Philo was a gifted child came at the age of three.  His father brought him to see an engineer in a large locomotive who explained the phases of the train's operation. When they arrived home, Philo made a detailed drawing of the locomotive.  "This demonstration of photographic memory won him much praise from the older members of the family and no doubt heralded the first seeds of greatness in his young mind."

One of the opportune occurrences happened when Philo was twelve and he moved with his family to an Idaho ranch powered by a Delco power system.  In the attic of the new home he found a stack of radio, popular science and semi-technical magazines that had been left there by the former owner who had installed the system.  He read an article about sending pictures along with sound by means of radio signals through the air.  Eventually, as chronicled by Elma, “Bit by bit he collected information that eventually led him to discover that mysterious, vitally important particle called the electron, the study of which would define his life.”

Two years later, Philo’s early morning farming chores included operating a disc harrow pulled by two horses.

As usual, his thoughts turned to how he might train electrons to convert a visual image into an electrical image so it could be sent through the air.  He knew this had to be done in a vacuum.  He had read of a man named Braun who had made a crude vacuum tube and who had produced light by directing an electrical beam to a surface coated with photosensitive material.  He had also read that an electron beam can be manipulated in a magnetic field.

As he turned the horses for another row, he looked back along the even rows he had made in the damp earth.  A thought struck him like a bolt out of the blue!  The tremendous import of this revelation hit him like a physical blow and came near to unseating him.  He could build the image like a page of print and print the image line after line!  With the speed of the electron, this could be done so rapidly the eye would view it as a solid picture!  He could hardly contain his excitement.  After mulling this idea around in his mind all the time and piecing it together one piece at a time, it had fallen together like a puzzle!

Elma further reflected:

The idea that germinated in his brain for electronic television must have been a gift from God, a partnership between divine inspiration and temporal genius.  From that single seed of inspiration he peeled away many of the mysteries of the physical universe and commanded the forces of nature to do his bidding.

At the onset of this adventure, Phil always worried that he lacked enough formal education.  But his experience was his education, more than any number of years at BYU could have provided.  His laboratory was his class room, and he was both student and professor.  He learned as much as he taught and taught as much as he learned.  Phil's lack of formal training was perhaps his greatest asset, rather than the liability he feared it would be, because it enabled him to structure his observation according to the unique framework of his God given genius.  He had been spared the burden of conventional wisdom and had been deprived only of the knowledge of what was impossible.

As one reads Elma Farnsworth's biography, it becomes noticeable how the necessary support staff and equipment became accessible to Philo at the appropriate times to result with the invention of electronic television.  

The newlyweds traveled to Los Angeles in 1926.  Elma wrote that they were staying at a hotel when the thought struck her that Philo's plan for electronic television showed the potential of changing society.  Philo gave a short history of television to the men who became his financiers.

In the 1880s there were many patent applications on various ideas for sending images through the air, none of which were very effective.  Then, on January 6, 1884, Paul Nipkow, a Russian working in Germany, applied for a German patent #30105, which disclosed the first mechanical method of transmission, using a perforated spinning disc.  From that time to the present, many patents had been granted on television, all relating to similar mechanical operations.  Phil explained that none of these ideas were capable of attaining the speed and resolution that acceptable television transmission would require.


Phil picked up a newspaper from the table and explained the method used to print the picture.  Calling their attention to the fine dots making up the picture, he explained that a slick magazine picture required much better definition.  In fact, it might require as many as a quarter of a million dots of much smaller size.

In the system that Phil proposed, a picture would be scanned one line at a time in a succession of dots and focused on a sensitized plate in his Image Dissector, where electrons would be released in proportion to the brightness of the individual picture elements: if the dot on the picture was black, no electrons would be released; if white, a maximum number would be released.  This stream of electrons would then be transmitted to a cathode-ray receiving tube to be reproduced on the photosensitive surface one line at a time.

"To get that definition over television," Phil continued, "a complete picture must be transmitted at the rate of about thirty per second.  That would require approximately 7,500,000 dots, or elements, every second.  I'm sure you can imagine that this speed is beyond the capacity of any mechanical device.  Of course it would have to be very carefully synchronized with the transmitter, or you would have a lot of mush on your screen."

Philo asked for a total of $25,000 from the backing syndicate who became his funding partners.  Philo's share was specified as 20 percent, establishing him as the largest single stockholder.  He built his first television system at Crocker Research Labs in San Francisco.  The date the crew produced the first all-electronic television picture was September 7, 1927.  When Philo began demonstrating the new system, the banking group of financiers found that "the big companies that had pioneered in other areas of radio and electronics, had heavily invested in mechanical television systems and were not yet ready to accept the futility of their approach."

A collection of documents known as the "Philo T. Farnsworth and George Everson Papers 1914-1999" is among the Special Collections at the Arizona State University Libraries.

Elma noted that young Philo humbly acknowledged an influence beyond himself.  During the years when he worked to realize his ‘distant vision,’ this influence would again be recognized.  Elma remembered one occasion when her husband was struggling with a particularly difficult problem.  He decided to fall asleep thinking about it and see what happened.  In the early hours of the morning, she awoke upon hearing Philo’s declaration of success: ". . . I was just awakened with the answer."  As Elma recalled, he seemed to derive energy from his very creative process: “Many times, he ran into what appeared to be insurmountable obstacles, but his stream of consciousness, like a stream of water when blocked, made other channels and found a way around, through, or over the problem.”

The book also mentions "Phil's concept of the engram, or thought flow in connection with the here/now, which is the only reality, that split second between what has gone before and the uncertainty of the future."

Philo received patent number 1,773,980 for his electronic television system in August 1930 but perfecting television would take many more years.  "Throughout the 1930s, Phil found his time divided between defending his patents, continuing to refine his system, and haggling with his own backers for adequate funding."

After a company reorganization with stock issued in 1938 and a patent license deal with RCA in 1939, there was a period of severe depression for Philo as World War II became an obstacle to the progress of commercial television.  He knew his most controlling patents would expire by 1954.  Despite unobtainable financial goals, he usually was able to appreciate his accomplishments and enjoy life’s simple pleasures.

The end of World War II in 1945 after the United States dropped two Atomic Bombs on Japan was described by Elma as "a sequence of events that plunged all mankind into an era of lost innocence."  She remembered, "It must have been about this time that I first heard Phil use the word 'fusion.'"  The solution to controlling nuclear fusion would be his major project for the remainder of Philo's life (as described in the previous blog article).  Elma observed, "Phil thought of fusion in the same light as he had television twenty five years earlier — as a difficult problem that he might be uniquely suited to solve."

In 1949 Philo's company became a wholly-owned subsidiary of ITT.   He worked on military research projects, including a submarine detection device.

The company continued to make television receivers and Capehart record-changer/radio combinations, and Phil’s research department continued to work on space-age contracts, mostly for the Air Force.  It soon became apparent, however that the company was being phased out of commercial television.  Manufacturing activities became limited to closed-circuit TV for surveillance and monitoring equipment for such places as atomic energy plants.


He became  an expert on star tracking.  He and his men developed a device for the United States early-warning system.  Deployed around our borders, it could detect and explode a missile long before it reached our shores.  An unidentified flying object of any sort could likewise be detected and destroyed.

Interpreting this instance of the expression ‘unidentified flying objects’ with ‘UFOs’/’flying saucers’ would make this pronouncement a dubious one as this is a simplistic view when one considers the published accounts described in previous blog articles.  One might also consider the video footage taken by space shuttle Discovery Mission STS-48 on September 15, 1991 near the west coast of Australia.  Mark J. Carlotto in an abstract wrote about an unidentified flying object (designated as 'M1') that changes direction and accelerates just before "a streak crosses the object's trajectory" that appears to indicate military targeting.  The footage may be viewed in You Tube videos.

Philo developed a new tube he called the Iotron, a memory tube able to retain an image for an indefinite period.  One model allowed air traffic to be controlled from the ground, another was used in defense units, while a third was developed for telescopes, "allowing astronomers to extend their vision by 50,000 times out in space."

Some divisions of the old Farnsworth Television & Radio Company were sold off eventually, and Farnsworth Electronics was formed as a dummy holding company for the Farnsworth patents.  Because of all the bad publicity connected with the Farnsworth Company during its unsuccessful efforts to preserve its identity, the ITT changed the name to Capehart Farnsworth, an ITT subsidiary.

The growth of the company under ITT was phenomenal.  Its operations expanded from the original Capehart plant to a second, and even a third plant.  In 1957 the Boeing company chose the Farnsworth Electronics company to build prototype equipment for its seven million, one hundred nine thousand dollar contract with the U.S. Air Force for the Bomark IM99 interceptor missile.  Farnsworth had been a pioneer in missile guidance systems since 1945, having subcontracts on the Bomark, Talos, Terrier, Sparrow, Meteor, Titan, Atlas, Rascal, and Lacrosse.

Elma mentioned that Philo's "concern over world affairs and the feeling he should be doing something about fusion weighed heavily upon him."

Near the end of Philo's life, Elma described what happened one night while he was very ill with pneumonia

About 4:00 A.M., he opened his eyes and calmly told me not to worry; it would be all right now.  He said his guardian angel and another personage would now keep watch, so we could go to sleep.  He then drifted off into a deep peaceful sleep for about six hours.  When he awoke, he told me these "personages" said he was on the brink of death, and it was his choice whether to return to his earthly life or go on.  He told them he still had work to do on earth.  They then said, "So be it."  He felt the fever begin to leave him.  It was then he spoke to reassure me, then drifted off to sleep.

Elma chronicled how soon thereafter Philo was ready to make his transition.  After his passing, she felt profound despair.  On the day after the funeral, she awakened at dawn with a strange feeling.

In recent years Phil and I had experimented with mental-telepathy to a small degree of success.  I had a feeling that he might be attempting to reach me mentally.  I concentrated all of my thoughts on Phil.  My intense efforts began to cause pains through my eyes and temples.

As I was about to give up, a voice spoke to me in my mind.  There was no sound, but the clear and distinct words had a calming effect on me.  The voice told me this was a very important time for Phil, and I must let him go . . . The voice went on to say that I still had important work to do on earth.  Suddenly I knew without a doubt the nature of this work, and I was at peace.”

Among the websites about Philo T. Farnsworth is The Philo T. Farnsworth Archives.