One Summer: America, 1927 (53 page)

27

In the spring of 1927, just before the Snyder-Gray trial consumed the world’s attention, an arresting story appeared as the second lead on page 1 of the
New York Times
. As an indication of its significance, the
Times
gave it seven stacks of headlines:

F
AR-OFF
S
PEAKERS
S
EEN

as W
ELL
as H
EARD
H
ERE

i
N A
T
EST OF
T
ELEVISION

L
IKE A
P
HOTO
C
OME TO
L
IFE

H
OOVER’S
F
ACE
P
LAINLY

I
MAGED AS
H
E
S
PEAKS

IN
W
ASHINGTON

T
HE
F
IRST
T
IME IN
H
ISTORY

P
ICTURES
A
RE
F
LASHED BY
W
IRE

AND
R
ADIO
S
YNCHRONIZING

WITH
S
PEAKER
’
S
V
OICE

C
OMMERCIAL
U
SE IN
D
OUBT

B
UT
AT&T H
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S
EES A
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ONQUEST OF
N
ATURE

A
FTER
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R
ESEARCH

The accompanying report described how reporters and officials at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Labs on Bethune Street in Manhattan had watched in astonishment as a live image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in Washington materialized before them on a glass screen about the size of a modern Post-it note.

“More than 200 miles of space intervening between the speaker and his audience was annihilated,” marveled the anonymous reporter. Listeners could even hear Hoover’s speech. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance,” the commerce secretary intoned with gravity and pomp.

“As each syllable was heard, the motion of the speaker’s lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen in the demonstration room,” explained the
Times
man. “It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that.”

Mr. Hoover was then succeeded by a comedian named A. Dolan, who first told some stories in an Irish brogue, then quickly changed into blackface and returned with “a new line of quips in negro dialect.” This, too, was deemed visually excellent.

It appears, however, that the reporter may have been carried away by the emotion of the moment, because the AT&T equipment was not capable of projecting really clear images. Realizing this, AT&T abandoned all attempts to conquer television soon afterward, and left the field open to others, of whom there were many.

As a theoretical notion, television had been around for some time. As far back as 1880, a French engineer named Maurice Leblanc saw that images could be sent a bit at a time because the eye retains an image for about a tenth of a second and thus can be fooled into seeing intermittent
images as whole ones. It’s why we see movies as a continuous show rather than as thousands of individual frames. That considerably simplified the challenge of transmission.

Four years later, a Russian named Paul Nipkow invented a system using a spinning disc to scan images onto a sensor through holes placed at calculated intervals around the disc. It was a tricky proposition, and Nipkow failed to make it work, but his disc became the standard on which nearly all subsequent attempts at creating television were based. The word
television
itself was coined by the Russian Constantin Perskyi, for the Paris Exhibition in 1900, though many other names were used for various devices in the early days—iconoscope, radiovisor, electric eye, even electric telescope.

By the 1920s, four parties were thought to be close to breakthrough: teams at Bell Laboratories and General Electric in the United States and the individuals Charles Francis Jenkins in Baltimore and John Logie Baird in Britain.

For all the effort and anticipation, no one knew quite what television would be good for. The general assumption was that the applications would mostly be practical.
Scientific American
, in an article titled “Motion Pictures by Radio,” foresaw television as a crime prevention device. “A criminal suspect might appear simultaneously in a thousand police headquarters for identification,” it supposed. AT&T saw it not as an entertainment medium, but as a way of allowing people on telephones to see each other.

Only Charles Francis Jenkins saw clearly what TV could offer. “The new machine will come to the fireside … with photoplays, the opera and a direct vision of world activities,” he predicted. Though forgotten now—he doesn’t even have an entry in the
American Dictionary of National Biography
—Jenkins was an accomplished inventor. He owned over four hundred patents, several of them for successful products, some of which we use yet. If you have ever had a drink from a conical paper cup, you have used a Jenkins product. But one invention that was never going to work was his radiovisor, as he called it. Even if he got it working, which he did not, it could only ever transmit forty-eight lines of image,
not enough to show objects as anything other than shadowy blurs. It would be like trying to identify objects through frosted glass.

But this was the deliriously upbeat 1920s, and although Jenkins did not have a product to sell, or anything more than a vague (and ultimately unrealizable) hope that his system could be developed into something commercially appealing one day, he formed a corporation that was soon valued at more than $10 million.

Much the same sort of inflated optimism attended the efforts of John Logie Baird, a Scotsman based in London. From an attic flat in Soho, Baird created a stream of mostly useless inventions, including inflatable shoes and a safety razor made of glass (so it wouldn’t rust). His private life was equally unorthodox in that he and another man shared the affections of a woman who had once been Baird’s girlfriend, was now the second man’s wife, and who found it impossible to choose between the two. In true British fashion, the arrangement to share was agreed between all three over a cup of tea.

As an inventor Baird was inspired and indefatigable, but always painfully short of funds. Most of his working models were assembled from salvaged oddments and other scraps. His first Nipkow disc was the lid of a ladies’ hatbox. His lenses were made from bicycle headlights. Wondering if he might get a better resolution of his images if he shone them through a real human eye, he called at the Charing Cross Ophthalmic Hospital and asked if they had any eyes they could spare. A doctor, thinking him a qualified anatomist, gave him one. Baird took the eye home on the bus but discovered that the optic nerve was useless without a blood supply, and anyway when he clamped the eyeball into his contraption he made such a gruesome mess of it that it made him ill. He put it all in the trash can.

Still, he persevered, and in his lab in 1925, Baird managed to transmit the world’s first recognizable image of a human face. Baird was an accomplished publicist—one of his stunts was to place a working TV in a window of Selfridge’s department store, drawing crowds great enough to stop traffic—and that brought a rush of financing. By 1927, Baird was at the head of a company that had nearly two hundred employees. He was
not a good company man and hated having to answer to a board of directors. Developing a particular dislike for Sir Edward Manville, the pompous chairman imposed on him by his principal investors, Baird had a lab built with an intentionally narrow entrance. The portly Manville, on his first visit, got stuck and had to be pushed through from behind. As Baird recalled proudly, Manville “lost several buttons from his waistcoat and dropped his cigar and tramped on it in the process”—and never visited the lab again.

The inescapable shortcoming of a Nipkow system, as Baird found to his unending frustration, was that it required a pair of large, noisily whirring discs—one to send and one to receive a signal—and could produce at best only a small image. A four-inch-square picture would require spinning discs six feet across—not something that many people would want in their living rooms. The discs could be dangerous, too, as a visiting scientist to Baird’s lab painfully discovered when he leaned too close and his long white beard was yanked into the workings.

The reality that Baird and all the others involved in mechanical television could never overcome was that spinning discs could simply not provide the clarity of image necessary to make television a commercial proposition. In practical terms it was impossible to produce more than about sixty lines of imagery, and the viewing screen could never be larger than about the size of a beverage coaster. Nevertheless, Baird persevered and by the summer of 1927 had about as good a working model as his system could provide.

On September 8, slightly less than five months after the Bell Labs presentation with Herbert Hoover, the
New York Times
reported another exciting demonstration of television, this time from England. As reporters looked on, Baird used his mechanical system to send a live image of himself more than two hundred miles, from Leeds to London. His image was clear, but it was also frustratingly small, at just two and a half inches by three; and, when magnified to a larger size through a special lens, it lost all clarity.

In fact, unbeknownst to Baird, the
New York Times
, and everyone else in the world at large, television had actually had its real birth one
day earlier in far-off California when a young man with the resplendent name of Philo T. Farnsworth, the greatest inventor of whom most people have never heard, used cathode ray tubes and an electron beam to produce an image that genuinely had the promise to make television an enchanting reality.

Farnsworth, “the forgotten father of television,” was born in 1906 in a log cabin in Utah. His parents, pious Mormons, moved the family to a farm in Idaho not long afterward, and it was there, in the idyllic surroundings of the Snake River valley, that young Philo spent a happy childhood. He was uncommonly bright and devoured everything he could find on science and technology. In the summer of 1921, while plowing his father’s field, the fifteen-year-old Philo had a scientific epiphany. He had been reading Einstein’s theory on electrons and the photoelectric effect, and now it occurred to him that beams of electrons could be scanned onto a screen in a back-and-forth pattern exactly as he was plowing his father’s field, one line at a time in alternating directions. Within months he had devised a workable plan for transmitting images electronically. He made a sketch of it, which he showed to his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman. Luckily for Farnsworth, Tolman was so impressed that he kept the drawing. It would later confirm Farnsworth’s priority for the invention.

Lacking financing, Farnsworth left the idea undeveloped and instead finished high school, married his sweetheart, and enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. One day Farnsworth fell into a chance conversation with two young businessmen from San Francisco, who were so impressed with his ideas that they offered to invest $6,000—which is to say, their entire joint savings—in the project, and to help him secure a bank loan. With this, Farnsworth set up a small lab on Green Street in San Francisco. He was still just twenty years old—too young, as he discovered, to sign the contract on the loan.

Farnsworth filed his first patents for television in January 1927. Building a working television system was an almost ridiculous challenge. Parts couldn’t be bought off the shelf—most of them didn’t exist, except in Farnsworth’s fertile brain—so nearly every glowing valve and gently
thrumming tube had to be designed and built from scratch. Farnsworth and a small team he assembled worked feverishly and by early September were ready to transmit the first image ever using electronic apparatus. The image was only a simple horizontal line, and Farnsworth sent it only as far as the next room, so it didn’t have the romance and awe of Baird’s or AT&T’s productions. But it did have one thing the rival inventions didn’t have: a future.

At the heart of Farnsworth’s system was something called an image-dissector camera, which allowed him to paint (as it were) pictures across a screen by scanning them in electronically one line at a time—and to do it so quickly that the eye was fooled into thinking it was seeing a series of continuous images. Even in its earliest versions Farnsworth’s system had 150 lines, giving it a crispness that no mechanical system could ever achieve.

Although the wider world knew nothing of Farnsworth’s invention, people who understood electronics soon learned of it and came to marvel at his work. One visitor was the physicist Ernest Lawrence, who was overjoyed to behold a part of Farnsworth’s device called the “multipactor,” which concentrated electron beams and fired them in bursts, multiplying their intensity. Inspired, Lawrence returned to Berkeley and produced the world’s first particle accelerator.

Eventually, Farnsworth had 165 patents, including for all the important elements of modern television, from scanning and focusing images to projecting live pictures across great distances. But the one thing he didn’t have was any way of making the whole enterprise commercial.

Enter David Sarnoff.

Sarnoff’s world was radio. From a technical point of view he didn’t know the first thing about television—he didn’t actually know that much about radio—but he had two qualities that Farnsworth signally lacked: commercial acumen and vision. He was the one person in the world who could transform television from an interesting laboratory novelty into something that everyone would want to have within ten feet of his sofa.