1.7 The Miracle of Electricity and Invisible Waves

Most everyone knows that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but his work in the communication field was just as groundbreaking. He invented the phonograph that would record and playback music and voices on physical disks, sounds captured and then recalled whenever the hearer wanted to re-hear them. This was magical stuff. These phonographs were not initially powered by electricity (making them all the more amazing as we look back) but by hand-cranked springs that powered the rotating cylinder or turntable.

He pioneered work on motion pictures—known as the kinetoscope or kinetograph, which cracked the code of using many “frames per second” of still images projected rapidly to create the illusion of motion. His inventions included the camera needed to record these multiple frames per second, and the projector that allowed him to play back the recording to a viewer at a later time. Which, by the way, is exactly how your 4K UHD TV performs the same miracle today—just a little bit more digital and a little less analog.

The photo above shows Thomas Edison’s 1889 Kinetograph, the first camera to take motion pictures on a moving strip of film.

Edison wasn’t the only genius inventor of the late 1800s, and the United States wasn’t the only place that was pushing the envelope of the magic of electricity.

In 1901, Italian engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi would prove that electricity and the “invisible waves” of electromagnetic energy (radio waves) could send signals through the air with no wires needed. He was 30 years old. His early experiments were conducted in Italy, but he realized that the money he needed to fund the commercialization of this technology might be more plentiful in London. His radio transmitters and receivers were soon being installed throughout Europe and the US, thus enabling Morse code to be sent across long distances with no wires needed.

Luckily, this new technology found its way onto the RMS Titanic along with other cargo and passenger ships being built at that time. The Titanic’s ship-board Marconi radio—often just called a “wireless”—allowed the sinking ship to call for help that frigid April night in 1912.

As World War I broke out in 1914, both the Central Powers and the Allies were actively using wireless sets in directing ground troops, guiding bombing runs from a giant dirigible (blimp), and yes, coordinating the first wartime airplanes toward their targets. These early signals started as Morse code, but with advances in frequency modulations and amplification, radio waves were soon able to carry not just dots and dashes, but voices, and even full stereophonic symphonies.

After the war was over, radio broadcasting became so omnipresent, and the overlap of radio transmissions so cluttered, that governments around the world had to step in and create order. In the United States, the Radio Act of 1927 (the precursor to today’s Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC), established the Federal Government’s right to regulate the use of the electromagnetic spectrum with registries and licenses to determine who could broadcast on which frequency.

It didn’t take Madison Avenue (the traditional home of the US advertising industry) to recognize radio for its true and highest calling: a new platform from which to sell ads and paid sponsorships. By the end of the 1920s, the majority of American households had at least one radio in the home, and there were over 600 licensed radio stations nationwide broadcasting news, sporting events, and entertainment in the homes of millions. The 1930s is known as the golden age of radio, and it produced some content and entertainment characters that continue to find audiences today: Sherlock Holmes, the Green Hornet, Dragnet, the Lone Ranger, and Tarzan, just to name a few. You might also recognize the names of the radio broadcasting companies that came into the world in the 1920s: the National Broadcasting Company, (NBC), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to take the magic of motion pictures (movie theaters were big business in the 1930s and 1940s) and find a way to send those moving images streaming through the air on the radio waves that were already lighting up homes around the world. What nobody expected though was who that someone would turn out to be.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born in a log cabin on August 19, 1906, in the rural town of Beaver, in central Utah. As a high school student, Farnsworth converted his family’s home appliances to run on electric power and then sketched out an idea for a vacuum tube that he would later use to create his “image dissector” that would make the dream of television possible. This was 1922. He was 16 years old. By 1926, he was able to raise the money he needed to continue his scientific work, and he moved to San Francisco with his new bride. The very next year, on September 7, 1927, he debuted his all-electronic television prototype in his research laboratory. Patents were filed, and the 21-year-old inventor and his sponsors were ready to reap the rewards of their hard work. But it was not to be.

When RCA (the largest radio production company in the United States) offered Farnsworth $100,000 for the rights to the television camera, transmitter, and receiver, Farnsworth and his partners rejected it as “much too low.” RCA then spent the next nine years in court trying to have Philo’s patent protections struck down. In the end, Philo didn’t get rich, and RCA didn’t win their lawsuits—the long-contested patents expired in 1947, and neither party was able to declare victory. Perhaps, that contributed to Mr. Farnsworth’s other famous quote about television to his children: “I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.”2