One Summer: America, 1927

paid him a visit. Farnsworth, thinking RCA wished to license his patents, happily showed Zworykin everything, including how to make an image dissector, the apparatus at the very heart of his system. Thanks to this help, RCA now quickly developed an image dissector of its own. Sarnoff airily informed Farnsworth that RCA didn’t actually want or need his patents – this was a lie – but that it was generously prepared to offer him $100,000 for everything: patents, diagrams, working models and all the contents of his lab. Farnsworth dismissed the offer as the insult that it was.
    Increasingly desperate for funds, Farnsworth sold out to the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, better known as Philco, and moved east. It was not a happy relationship. Farnsworth hated being a salaried employee. When his infant son died, Farnsworth requested time off to take the boy back to Utah to bury him in the family plot. Philco refused to give him leave, and the two parted ways soon after. Philco meanwhile became convinced that RCA was trying to bribe or blackmail its employees into giving away trade secrets. It filed a suit charging RCA operatives with plying Philco employees with ‘intoxicating liquors at hotels, restaurants and nightclubs’. The case was settled out of court.
    All this made Farnsworth increasingly paranoid and stressed. From the confidently beaming youth of a year or two before, he became a gaunt and driven-looking figure. Even his hair looked angry. He argued with his original investors and flatly refused to collaborate with any outsiders. Eventually, he ended up with a lawsuit against RCA for patent infringement.
    Sarnoff couldn’t bear to come second at anything and never hesitated to crush those who challenged him. When Edwin H.Armstrong, an electrical engineer, invented FM radio, which provided clearer, stronger signals than AM radio, Sarnoff did all in his power to have it suppressed by getting the Federal Communications Commission to restrict available bandwidth for it. Armstrong sued and found the wrath of RCA coming down upon him. RCA’s lawyers tied him up in court for years. The battle cost Armstrong his health and every penny he owned. In 1954, despondent and broke, he committed suicide.
    Now RCA waged much the same sort of battle against Farnsworth. It maintained that Farnsworth could not have conceived of electronic television in 1922 on the grounds that a fifteen-year-old schoolboy could hardly have come up with an idea that had eluded the most brilliant minds of science and technology for years. Luckily for Farnsworth, his old chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, was able to produce his original sketch. That, and the fact that Farnsworth possessed the relevant patents, left the court in no doubt. In 1935, it ruled that Farnsworth was ‘the undisputed inventor of television’ – a stunning victory for the lone inventor.
    RCA essentially ignored the ruling. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair it demonstrated a working television that was entirely dependent on Farnsworth patents, for which it had neither made payment nor secured permission. After years of further wrangling, RCA finally agreed to pay Farnsworth $1 million and a royalty on every television sold. However, Farnsworth’s most valuable patents ran out in the late 1940s, just as TV was about to take off, so he never got anything like the full measure of wealth to which he was rightly entitled.
    In 1950, Sarnoff secured a promise from the Radio and Television Manufacturers Association of America that it would refer to him henceforth as ‘the Father of Television’ and to Vladimir Zworykin as ‘the Inventor of Television’. Farnsworth was effectively expunged from the record.
    Farnsworth retired to Maine and descended into alcoholism. He died in March 1971, drunk, depressed and forgotten. He wassixty-four years old. The New York Times , in its obituary, referred to him not as the inventor of television, but as a ‘pioneer in the design of television’. Sarnoff died later that same year at the venerable age of eighty.
    After television, Vladimir Zworykin helped to invent the electron microscope. He survived Sarnoff and Farnsworth by eleven years, dying in 1982 the day before his ninety-third birthday. In an interview in 1974, he claimed never to watch television because it was so mindless, and said that his greatest contribution to television technology was the invention of the off switch.
    In fact, the off switch was invented by