In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 1906
- Died
- 1971
- Birthplace
- Not independently established
- Country
- United States
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- The image dissector and an electronic television system
Why this life matters
His work helped shift image scanning from moving mechanical parts to the controlled motion of electrons.
Timeline
Key moments
Design at school
Sketches an electronic approach to image scanning.
Tube and application
The surviving experimental dissector and television system application date from this year.
System patent
The patent publishes the system design.
A way to scan without a disc
Farnsworth grew up in Utah and Idaho and thought about electronic television while still at school. He considered an alternative to scanning a scene with moving parts. A practical design would have to turn areas of different brightness into an ordered signal, then preserve that order in the receiver. The arrangement was an idea before it was an instrument that could be tested.
Family obligations interrupted his studies. Backers enabled him to return to the project in the 1920s. The lab work gave him resources to try producing and controlling an image made of electrons.
Sources for this section: [1]
An experimental image dissector
The Smithsonian preserves a camera tube he made in 1927. Light focused on a sensitive surface caused electrons to leave it. The tube selected a small part of the resulting image at a time and repeated that operation across the field. The electrical output could therefore carry a sequence corresponding to brightness at different positions.
A system patent filed in 1927 and issued in 1930 set out the transmission and reconstruction problem. The date when a claim was filed differs from the date of an object and from the date of a patent grant. Those distinctions matter in a field in which several laboratories made related advances.
The commercial context
The work brought Farnsworth into competition with RCA, where Vladimir Zworykin developed camera and display tubes. Technical success did not create a television industry on its own. Regular services needed standards, studio equipment, receivers and organisations willing to pay for programming. Farnsworth’s strongest documented contribution is the electronic scanning design and the working apparatus that lets readers study how his particular system approached the problem.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Philo Farnsworth
- What was the image dissector?
- It was Farnsworth’s electronic television camera tube, designed to convert a projected image to a succession of electrical signals.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Vladimir Zworykin
Compare a competing camera tube that stored charge before scanning.
- David Sarnoff
Read how television reached the public through RCA’s institutional work.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. Lemelson-MITPhilo Farnsworth
Selected life and funding passages. Avoids exclusive-inventor language and priority claims that go beyond the object and patent.
- 2. National Museum of American HistoryExperimental Farnsworth image dissector
- 3. U.S. Patent OfficeTelevision system, US1773980A
