The Boy Genius and the Mogul by Daniel Stashower, Broadway Books, New York, $24.95, ISBN 0767907590
NO ONE invented television. It took a whole gang of people to make it possible. Paul Nipkow, Charles Francis Jenkins, Ernst Alexanderson and John Logie Baird favoured a spinning wheel or mirror drum. Short-term, limited success whetted the public鈥檚 appetite. A. A. Campbell Swinton, Boris Rosing, Vladimir Zworykin, Edouard Belin, Kenjiro Takayanagi and the EMI-Marconi team with Alan Blumlein all took the more difficult all-electronic route.
So did 15-year-old Idaho farmboy Philo Farnsworth, who began to plan a system with 鈥渘o moving parts鈥� in 1922. His patents, filed in 1927, put him in head-on competition with Zworykin and the giant Radio Corporation of America under ruthless David Sarnoff.
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RCA was earning a fortune from its pool of several thousand radio patents. Sarnoff refused on principle to pay anyone else a royalty. Instead, he tried to break them and their patents. It was this that drove Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, to suicide.
Sarnoff tried for 10 years to break Farnsworth. It was his first failure and as RCA made headlines with television at the New York World鈥檚 Fair in 1939, Sarnoff agreed to take a licence. But it was too late for Farnsworth, who slid into mental and physical decline and died, forgotten, in 1971.
Daniel Stashower has made the story accessible in The Boy Genius and the Mogul, but the book lacks clear explanations of the rival technologies鈥攁nd there are no patent numbers for reference.