Philo Farnsworth: television's inventor, and Fort Wayne's factory

1939-1967 in Fort Wayne

The correction first: Philo Farnsworth is sometimes folded into Fort Wayne's General Electric story, and that is a different company's thread (it runs through this section in the stub for Bruce Nauman, whose father was the GE engineer). Farnsworth's Fort Wayne company was his own. He came to this city as the most consequential independent inventor in electronics, a man who had beaten RCA in the patent fight over television itself, and he came to manufacture: in 1938 his Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation reorganized and bought the Fort Wayne factory of the Capehart Corporation, the phonograph maker, and from 1939 the plant at 3700 East Pontiac Street made Farnsworth radios, and in time Farnsworth television sets, under the inventor's own name. The Indiana Broadcast History Archive, at Indiana University, fixes the span in one line: Farnsworth lived in Fort Wayne from 1939 to 1967, where his corporation and his research laboratory were located.

What he had already done: Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born on 19 August 1906 near Beaver, Utah, and raised on Idaho farms, where, plowing straight furrows as a teenager, he conceived the idea that made him: an image could be scanned line by line by an electron beam, as a field is plowed row by row. On 7 September 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, his image dissector transmitted the first all-electronic television picture, a straight line. RCA, building its own television empire on Vladimir Zworykin's work, challenged his priority, and the proceedings of 1934 proved decisively, in the News-Sentinel's later summary, that Farnsworth held the basis patents. The farm boy had out-invented the corporation, and the corporation spent years paying for the lesson.

The Fort Wayne years: The Fort Wayne chapter is the manufacturer's chapter. His company owned WGL, one of the city's radio stations, and ran a second plant at Marion. The war turned the Pontiac Street works to defense electronics; the peace, in 1947, brought the first television set to carry his name out of his own factory. The independent run ended in 1949, when International Telephone and Telegraph bought the company, reorganized as Capehart-Farnsworth, and kept the inventor on as vice president of research, work that in Fort Wayne turned, characteristically, to a new frontier: his fusor, an attempt at controlled nuclear fusion, occupied his laboratory years here. The Farnsworth residence from 1948 to 1967, at 734 East State Boulevard, later housed a museum in his name, and the factory stood until 2010. He died on 11 March 1971 in Salt Lake City, the holder, by the counts that disagree in the usual way, of 165 patents in the Indiana archive's reckoning and about 300 in the standard biography's, foreign filings included; this section prints both numbers, named, rather than split the difference. Fort Wayne's claim is residence and work at full size for twenty-eight years: television was invented in San Francisco, but for a generation it was made, and its maker lived, in Fort Wayne.

Sources:

1. Indiana Broadcast History Archive, Indiana University, Philo T. Farnsworth person page (lived in Fort Wayne 1939-1967; the corporation and research lab; WGL; the Marion plant; the fusion work; 165 patents; died 11 March 1971).
2. News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne history project, 1950-1959 chapter, "Farnsworth now recognized as TV pioneer" (the Capehart purchase; the Pontiac Street plant; the 1934 patent proceedings; the 1949 ITT sale; the first Farnsworth television set, 1947).
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Philo Taylor Farnsworth (born 19 August 1906, Beaver, Utah; the first all-electronic television system; the 1927 transmission), as carried in the Fort Wayne Farnsworth account.