wn

Famswmth

Part

I

ByFrank

Lovece

The

strange

story

of

TV's

trMed

origins

ing the

Legend-kept

drowning him

out.

The

Legend

has

begun

to

crumble onlynow, through reappraisal

of

neglected

doc-

uments, fresh talks

with

colleagues

and

family members, and

two

important

dis-coveries: the manuscript of.Zworykin's

un-

published

autobiography, and

a

series oflong-hidden videotaped

interviews

con-

ducted

by

video pioneer

Chuck

Azar

to-

ward the end of.Zworykin's life.

Altogether

they

reveal

that

through

most

of,

Zwory-kin's tenure

at

RCA-until

his office

was

one day unceremoniously shut

down-the

humble

scientist toed

the

conglomerate'sofficial

line. Yet the "father of

television"

always

knew,

and

it

bothered

him,

that

for

the

millions

of

dollars RCA pumped

into

TV,

there

was always

another

man.

This other

was

not

a

corporate

scientist

hke

Zworykin but

a

frontier

maverick who

didn't

realize

the 20th century

was no place

for

lone

inventors.

Yet

on

a

budget

with farfewer

zeroes than

Zworylnn's,

the maver-

ick

matched

his

esteemed competitor

stride

for stride.

RCA czar David

Sarnoff

tried

to

buy

out that

maverick.

Failing that,he

had

RCA

try

to

claim

prior rights

in the

maverick's

key

patent. And

failing

that,Sarnoff and

RCA

kept

up years

of

costly

legal battles

until

finally,

for

perhaps the

first

time

in

Sarnoffs life,

he

was

forced to

surrender. Then,

using

the

same

iron fist

that

crushed

FM-radio

developer

Edwin

Armstrong,

he

rolled out

a

propaganda ma-

chine meant

to

insure

that

RCA's Legend,and

not the maverick, would live

on.

The irony is that the real story

is muchmore legendary

than

the Legend

itself.

It'sa

screenwriter's fantasy, part Reds, partFrank

Capra. Rather than

diminishZwory-

kin's

stature,

it

humanizes

him

and gives

clues to his

inspiration. Just

as

important,

it

gives

credit to

a

quintessentially American

inventor by the

name

of

Philo

T.

Farns-

worth.

It

becomes,

in fact,

less a tale of

two

inventors than

the story of

how

sci-

ence slid

from

the

19th century

into

the

20th.

Eorly Visions

Television was

always

a

part

of

that

slide. Though the notion

of images in

crys-

tal

balls and magic

mirrors

had been

in

humankind's collective

consciousness

for

centuries,

the

idea

of

"television"

is

a

l9th-century

conceit.

The

origin

of

the

word

itself

is

speculative. Pioneer

sci-homas

Edison never

existed.

Neither

did the

Wright Broth-

ers

or

Alexander

Graham

Bell.

They

gave

us

sweat and

in-

tellect,

of

course, but what we

want

to

believe

in

are

the

legends.

Nevermind

that

Edison

had

regiments

of

assis-

tants, or that the Wright

Brothers

relied

on

years of other

people's research as muchas

their

own. Bell? He got his

ideas

fromthe telegraph, not

heaven.

Tucked

somewhere

between

GeorgeWashington's

cherry tree

and

the

Ringling

Brothers'

unicorn lies the Legend of

Tele-

vision.

It

goes

like

this:

While there

was nosingie

inventor,

a

Russian-American scien-

tist

named

Vladimir

Zworyl<rn is

"the father

of

television.

"

He

invented a

TV-camera

tube

called

the

iconoscope

in

1923.

Ormaybe 1925.

With his picture tube,

thekinescope,

he

completed the

first

practical

electronic

TV

system

n

1924.

Or

maybe1925.

Or

1928. (Legends

are

so

hard

to pin

down.

) Zworykin

and

staff, under the

aegis

of RCA

czar David Sarnoff, almost single-

handedly

brought television out

of

the

two-

cans-and-a-string stage.

RCA rolled

on

togtve America

its first TV

sets

and pro-

grams

starting at

the

1939

World's

Fair.

This is the

Legend of Television. Likemost,

it's

essentially untme.

Zworyl<tn,

who

died

in

1982, did possess

a

brilliant

and

unorthodox mind which

con-

jured

many

of

the most critical elements

of

the modern

TV

set.

His

and

RCA's

contri-

butions

not

just

to

TV

but

to every

facet

ofelectro-optics

are

incalculable.

Yet:

"the

father

of

television"? Zworykin

himself

kept

saying he

couldn't

pass

the

blood

test.But

a

larger

voice-the

voice

of

RCA

tout-

 

ence-fiction

publisher Hugo

Gernsback

rs

said

to

have Anglicized

it

from the

French

term

around

this century's

first

decade;

a

Russian, Constantin

Perskyi,

previouslyused

it

in

a

paper he presented

in

Paris in1900. As early as

1907

the

word

appeared

in

Scienffic

American.

In

any case,

it

was

with the

1837

emer-

gence

of the

telegraph

that

inventors

all

over the world started to

poke around

for

this

thing-with-no-name.

By the

1840s

they'd

already found

the

first

clues:

still-picture

transmission

over wires.

To

accomplish

this they

came

up

with the

no-

tion

of

"scanning,

"

wherein

an image

is

sent

and reproduced one

line at a

time.

That's the

way

TV

sets

work

even today.Some 30 years

later

a

British

telegraph

operator

named

Joseph

May

discovered

that the element

selenium responds elec-

tncally

to

light-the

stronger

the

light

you

throw

on

it,

the stronger the electrical cur-

rent

you

get.

This got

people think-ing: light

falling

on

a

mosaic

of

selenium

cells could

be turned into

correspondingbits of

electricity.

(This electrical output

is

called

the

"photoelectric

effect,

"

and themosaics

"photoelectric

cells.

") At

the re-

ceiving end,

as

the

idea

evolved, would

be

a glass screen.

Television

stood

in this

theoretical

mistuntil

1884.

That year

Paul

Nipkow,

a

Pom-

eranian engineer studying

in

Berlin,

ob-tained

a

German patent

for

a

disc

with

lots

of

holes in

a

spiral

pattern. Nipkow

figuredthis disc,

spinning

furiously,

could

"scan"

a

subject point

by

point. The resulting points

of

light

could be

turned into electrical ener-

gy

and sent

in

a

rapid stream

to

a

photoelectric mosaic.

At

the receiving

end

would

spin

a

second, synchronized disc in

front

of which

rested

a glass

plate where,

theoretically,

a

picture

would appear.

I

say

"theoretically"

because

there's no

evi-dence

Nipkow

actually

built

one

of

these

contraptions.

Nonetheless,

somebody

along

the line

had

the great

idea

to

callthisinvention

"the

Nipkow

disc,

"

and

for

the

next

few

decades

hordes

of

inventors

would

use

this mechanically operated

opti-

cal

disc

as

the

basis

for

so-called

"mechani-

cal" television

systems.

It

would

be

almost

40

Years beforeFarnsworth and

Zworykin

would

decide,

separately, to break from that horde.

Theycould

see

the

dead

end down

mechanical

TV's

road.

They

also could see

that

theexpanding science

of

physics

could bringsomething

better:

electronic

TV.

It

may be

easy today

to

tellthe

difference between,

say,

a mechanical Super-8

movie

camera

and an electronic video

camera-but it

wasn't at

all apparent

in the

days of

hand-

crank

Victrolas.

It

wouldn't

have been apparent even

toFarnsworth

and

Zworykin were

it

not for

some

previous

serendipitous discoveries.

It

was

Britain's Sir

William Crookes, for

instance,

who

discovered

that

cathode

rays-which

would become

the

highway

carrying video signals-could

exist

in

a

vacuum

tube.

It

was

Karl

Ferdinand Braun

70

Video

Vladimir

Kosma

Zworykin

in

1929

(aboue)

and

1940 demonstrating

"

the

first"

electronic

TV

using

a

kinescope

picture

tube

and

iconoscope

(right).

who found

a

way

of

magnetically controlling

electron

beams

inside Crookes'

cath-

ode-ray

tube (CRT).

And

it

was

Russian

physicist

Boris

Rosing

who

in

1907

pro-

posed

(and

later patented)

a

mechanical

TV

system

with

a

Braun

CRT. All this

seems

to

have prompted

a

prescient

Scotsmannamed Alan

A.

Campbell-Swinton

to

sug-

gest-first

in a

1908

letter to the

editor,

then

in a

1911

presentation-that

CRTs

could

be

used

both

as

a

transmitter

(camera

tube)

and

a

receiver

(picture

tube).Campbell-Swinton was a

great thinker,

but

he

didn't follow through.

He

never

con-

structed the system

he

proposed. Howev-

er, if

you

look at

today's video equipment

you'll

realize

that

it's

his system

we're

us-

ing. To

be

fair,

electronics

technology

wasn't

yet

up

to

Campbell-Swinton's

con-

cept;

Rosing's

own attempts

were

less

than

spectacular.

Funny

thing,

though.

They

inspired

Rosing's

prize

student,Vladimir

Kosma

Zworykin.

Grovitqting to

Physics

That

Zworykin

became

more

interestedin

physics than

in the family

business

is

a

little

surprising.

His

father owned one ofthe

most prosperous steamship lines in

all

of

Czarist

Russia and young Vladimir

thrived

on watching him

negotiate.

It

was

straight out

of

Fanny

and

Alexander, thischildhood

of

sleighrides

and

plum

pud-

dings-the

very

stuff

conjured by another

Russian's

Nutcracker

Suite. The

greatthree-story

house

in

Mourom, where

he

was

born

on

July

30,

1889,

was

so

huge

that

Vladimir,

his parents,

and

those

of his

six

siblings

who

hadn't fled

the nest

lived,

with

nursemaids and servants

running

around,

on the

second

floor only. Zwory-

kin's family

was among the

first

to get elec-

tricity

and

a

telephone. Blond and

blue-eyed Vladimir was

a

smart precocious kid.He hunted

and

ice-skated

like

his

peers-

but

he was

also a

self-admitted

terror.

Heaccidently

burned down

a

barn

once

with

some homemade

fireworks.That

and

other

episodes may have

been

just

his

genes

crying

out for

him

to

be

a

scientist.

In

his

unpublished

autobiogra-

phy,

dictated

and

transcribed

in the

mid-

1940s,

one

of

his

earliest memories

in-volves exploring

the

attic

and

finding

scien-

tific

papers belonging

to

his late uncle

lvan,

a

Moscow physicist. Adding

nurture

to

na-

ture,

though, Zworykin's family

always

sent

him

to

the best

schools.

There

he