Philo Taylor Farnsworth died

On this day in 1971 Philo Taylor Farnsworth died, he is the man who helped invent the television.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born on 19th August 1906 in Utah USA. Although he made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of all-electronic television, he is perhaps best known for inventing the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device, the ‘image dissector’. It was the first fully functional, all-electronic television system. Farnsworth developed a television system complete with receiver and camera, which he produced commercially in the form of the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, from 1938 to 1951.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth, 1939

Farnsworth worked out the principle of the image dissector in the summer of 1921, not long before his fifteenth birthday, and demonstrated the first working version on September 7, 1927. In the course of a patent interference suit brought by RCA in 1934 and decided in February 1935, his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, produced a sketch he had made of a blackboard drawing Farnsworth had shown him in spring 1922. Farnsworth won the suit; RCA appealed the decision in 1936 and lost. Although Farnsworth was paid royalties by RCA, he never became wealthy. The video camera tube that evolved from the combined work of Farnsworth, Zworykin and many others was used in all television cameras until the late 20th century, when alternate technologies such as charge-coupled devices started to appear.

Farnsworth also developed the ‘image oscillite’, a cathode ray tube that displayed the images captured by the image dissector.

Farnsworth called his device an image dissector because it converted individual elements of the image into electricity one at a time. He replaced the spinning disks with cesium, an element that emits electrons when exposed to light.

He died penniless in March 1971. Farnsworth held 300 U.S. and foreign patents. His inventions contributed to the development of radar, infra-red night vision devices, the electron microscope, the baby incubator, the gastroscope, and the astronomical telescope.

If you could invent anything, what would it be?