Not all that obscure. When I was an Electronics Engineering major at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, way back in 1963, Farnsworth came and gave a talk in our little auditorium. Afterwards, he hung around and chatted with individual students. I've known who he was since the 50s.
Each state can have two statues of famous citizens from their state in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol in DC.
Idaho has Philo.
"And the deeper our immersion becomes, the less likely it seems we'll poke our heads above the surface and see there must have been life before someone invented TV."
Until we actually had TV, life was the same as before TV was invented. I remember life without TV quite well. The writer's the fish here.
Hero. But he would never have thought Shepard Smith would abuse his great invention.
Little did he realize the abuse to which his device would be put. If he had, he would have swallowed a .38.
Farnsworth is in a limited club of innovators who got edged out by businessmen. Tesla, Westinghouse, IBM.
Sarnoff was a real bastard. He also did a job on Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of FM, and a number of other extremely important concepts that underly every aspect of wireless technology today. Armstrong eventually committed suicide after years of battling Sarnoff's lawyers. He should have died a rich man, instead he died a pauper.
Lee De Forest, (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor with over 300 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use of electronics.
He was involved in several patent lawsuits (and he spent a fortune from his inventions on the legal bills). He had four marriages and several failed companies, he was defrauded by business partners, and he was once indicted for mail fraud, but was later acquitted.
Andre-Marie Ampere
Otis Boykin
Rudolf Diesel
Thomas Edison
Michael Faraday
Benjamin Franklin
Luigi Galvani
William Gilbert
Otto von Guericke
Joseph Henry
Charles Franklin Kettering
Lewis Latimer
James Clerk Maxwell
Isaac Newton
Hans Christian Oersted
Georg Ohm
Lester Pelton
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
William Stanley, Jr.
Nikola Tesla
Alessandro Volta
George Westinghouse
Granville Woods
Philo jolt!
Neat.
'His sole appearance on national television was as a mystery guest on the CBS game show "I've Got a Secret" in 1957. He fielded questions from the celebrity panelists as they tried in vain to guess his secret ("I invented electronic television"). For stumping them, Farnsworth took home $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes.
In 1971, Farnsworth died at age 64.'
Cigarettes, another genius deceived by big tobacco dies young.
Interesting.