Local man recalls meeting “mother of television”
Published 5/16/06
When Elma Farnsworth passed away a couple weeks ago, most people—including millions of viewers of TV’s “American Idol”—probably didn’t blink.
But for Anderson’s David Baird, professor of journalism at Anderson University and student of media history, Farnsworth’s death deserved a moment or two of pause and reflection.
Only media students and scholars know that Elma, nicknamed “Pem,” was intimately involved in the invention of the electronic television in the 1920s with husband and visionary Philo Farnsworth. David met and interviewed Pem at her home in Ft. Wayne while he was enrolled in a doctoral course, “History of American Broadcasting,” at Purdue.
“Knowing that she was in the lab where TV was invented, and an eyewitness to such an important invention, it was my ‘brush with history,’ ” says David of the April 1999 interview. “It was like meeting Gutenberg.”
Unfortunately, the Farnsworth name never had the recognition of inventors such as Gutenberg, Edison or Bell. Pem had dedicated her life to telling the story of her husband’s pioneering work, which began when he was just a young boy on an Idaho farm.
As the story goes, Philo Farnsworth first imagined electronic TV while plowing the family’s potato field row by row at age 14.
According to Dave, Pem told him that the challenge for her husband was scanning an image onto a picture tube row by row using an image dissector tube.
In 1927, Farnsworth applied for a patent for a complete electronic television system, including the tube, the same year that he transmitted an image into a receiver in the next room. Elma, who kept logbooks and spot welded tube elements for her husband, earned recognition as “the first woman on TV” when Philo first transmitted human images in 1929.
An unfortunate chapter was introduced into the Farnsworth story when RCA unveiled its own TV, three years after an RCA engineer’s visit to the Farnsworth lab, and challenged several Farnsworth patents. Although the courts ruled in Farnsworth’s favor in the late 1930s, his invention didn’t become part of American living rooms until after his patents expired in 1947.
During his 1999 interview, Dave asked Pem if she and her husband had speculated how TV might affect the world. The interview transcript shows that the Farnsworths thought the advent of television could usher in an era of hope. Pem told Dave that they both believed that peaceful solutions to international conflicts would be possible once rival nations could see images of how differing cultures lived.
But as TV became commercially available, the Farnsworths banished from their home their own invention. “Phil felt there was too much junk on it,” Pem told Dave in the interview. “One time he said, you know, I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.”
However, when the world watched Apollo 11 crew members step off the lunar module and touch the surface of the moon, as Pem remembers it, “He turned to me and said, ‘Pem, this makes it all worthwhile.’ ”
According to Pem, her husband took a few “sidetrips” from his work with TV to invent the incubator and the electron microscope. He held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents when he died in 1971.
Noting that Farnsworth was self taught, suffered from bad health, lost a home in a fire, fought depression and faced years of legal hassles from a corporate giant, Dave says that the life of Pem’s husband is a lesson to students.
“It’s important for students to see that these technologies are developed by real people who battle enormous odds,” he said.
Dave and Purdue communication professor, Robert Ogles, who also made the trip to meet Pem, recently sent a transcript of the interview to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.
On the day of final exams last month, Dave told students about Pem’s death and recalled his brush with history. “I’ll always treasure having that meeting, and it’s a story I will tell until I retire,” he says.
When Dave hits that age and wonders if the meeting ever really happened, he’ll have a tangible reminder. It’s a copy of Pem’s 1990 book “Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier.”
Inscribed just inside are the words: “Best wishes to David. Remember the sky is the limit. The impossible just takes longer. Pem Farnsworth.”
When Elma Farnsworth passed away a couple weeks ago, most people—including millions of viewers of TV’s “American Idol”—probably didn’t blink.
But for Anderson’s David Baird, professor of journalism at Anderson University and student of media history, Farnsworth’s death deserved a moment or two of pause and reflection.
Only media students and scholars know that Elma, nicknamed “Pem,” was intimately involved in the invention of the electronic television in the 1920s with husband and visionary Philo Farnsworth. David met and interviewed Pem at her home in Ft. Wayne while he was enrolled in a doctoral course, “History of American Broadcasting,” at Purdue.
“Knowing that she was in the lab where TV was invented, and an eyewitness to such an important invention, it was my ‘brush with history,’ ” says David of the April 1999 interview. “It was like meeting Gutenberg.”
Unfortunately, the Farnsworth name never had the recognition of inventors such as Gutenberg, Edison or Bell. Pem had dedicated her life to telling the story of her husband’s pioneering work, which began when he was just a young boy on an Idaho farm.
As the story goes, Philo Farnsworth first imagined electronic TV while plowing the family’s potato field row by row at age 14.
According to Dave, Pem told him that the challenge for her husband was scanning an image onto a picture tube row by row using an image dissector tube.
In 1927, Farnsworth applied for a patent for a complete electronic television system, including the tube, the same year that he transmitted an image into a receiver in the next room. Elma, who kept logbooks and spot welded tube elements for her husband, earned recognition as “the first woman on TV” when Philo first transmitted human images in 1929.
An unfortunate chapter was introduced into the Farnsworth story when RCA unveiled its own TV, three years after an RCA engineer’s visit to the Farnsworth lab, and challenged several Farnsworth patents. Although the courts ruled in Farnsworth’s favor in the late 1930s, his invention didn’t become part of American living rooms until after his patents expired in 1947.
During his 1999 interview, Dave asked Pem if she and her husband had speculated how TV might affect the world. The interview transcript shows that the Farnsworths thought the advent of television could usher in an era of hope. Pem told Dave that they both believed that peaceful solutions to international conflicts would be possible once rival nations could see images of how differing cultures lived.
But as TV became commercially available, the Farnsworths banished from their home their own invention. “Phil felt there was too much junk on it,” Pem told Dave in the interview. “One time he said, you know, I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.”
However, when the world watched Apollo 11 crew members step off the lunar module and touch the surface of the moon, as Pem remembers it, “He turned to me and said, ‘Pem, this makes it all worthwhile.’ ”
According to Pem, her husband took a few “sidetrips” from his work with TV to invent the incubator and the electron microscope. He held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents when he died in 1971.
Noting that Farnsworth was self taught, suffered from bad health, lost a home in a fire, fought depression and faced years of legal hassles from a corporate giant, Dave says that the life of Pem’s husband is a lesson to students.
“It’s important for students to see that these technologies are developed by real people who battle enormous odds,” he said.
Dave and Purdue communication professor, Robert Ogles, who also made the trip to meet Pem, recently sent a transcript of the interview to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.
On the day of final exams last month, Dave told students about Pem’s death and recalled his brush with history. “I’ll always treasure having that meeting, and it’s a story I will tell until I retire,” he says.
When Dave hits that age and wonders if the meeting ever really happened, he’ll have a tangible reminder. It’s a copy of Pem’s 1990 book “Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier.”
Inscribed just inside are the words: “Best wishes to David. Remember the sky is the limit. The impossible just takes longer. Pem Farnsworth.”
posted by Jack W. Williams | 8:40 PM
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