Even the Baird-Farnsworth debate isn’t quite right. Alan Campbell-Swinton of Scotland theorized using CRT tubes in both the camera and receiver in 1908, but later called the results of his experiments “disappointing.” Vladimir Zworkin developed a CRT receiver and mechanical transmitter in 1911 (predating Baird,) but his work languished until he came to the U.S. in the 1920s. He couldn’t develop a practical electronic camera-receiver system until 1928. Bell Labs experimented with all-electronic video in 1922. Baird introduced his mechanical method in 1926. Kálmán Tihanyi of Hungary was working on improving the camera tube in 1924, and was granted a patent in 1926. Max Dieckmann and Rudolf Hell applied for a patent for the image dissector camera tube in 1925, but although the patent was granted in 1927, they were never able to produce a practical version.
Farnsworth had been working with the image dissector concept since 1921, introduced his working model in 1927. His great leap forward was developing electronic scanning, rather than the mechanical scanning used by Baird and the other early inventors.
TL;DR a lot of people “invented” television, but only Baird and Farnsworth were able to get the invention out of their laboratories and into working models.
The book I read about the history of television was Tube by David Fisher. It gets a bit technical, but filled in some of the holes in my understanding of what happened. It helps if you have some electrical engineering background. (I bought it used from the local library’s book sale.)
I did graduate work in communications in 1972. It’s incredible to do the math and realize that year was closer to the first steps on television than to today.
Minor nitpick. Farnsworth had an idea in high school that he sketched out, but he couldn’t do anything with it until 1927. That he had the idea is undoubtedly impressive, but lots of people have ideas and don’t get credit for them.
Same with some of your other dates. People get tagged with very different levels of achievement. There’s seldom a good middle ground between a popular work and a Ph.D. dissertation.
Your list also hits at the point that people all over the world have inventive genius and therefore contribute to national pride that often overwhelms factual definitions. Everybody wants a piece of the action.
Philo Farnsworth may or may not deserve to be considered the inventor of television, but I think we can all agree that his descendant Hubert Farnsworth was indeed one of history’s greatest inventors.
That’s the book I was trying to think of so I could check the facts, but it didn’t have “television” in the title when I tried to look it up. Darn.
And I swear your post wasn’t there I when posted earlier and replied directly to post above me, which was by Kent_Clark. That seems to have happened to me several times recently, meaning either that Discourse is going wonky or my head is.
One factor that they learned in their bicycle work was the idea of banking. Lots of others who were trying for powered flight focused on wing design and engine power, and thought of piloting as something two-dimensional, like a ship.
The Wrights’ insight was the need to find a way to control an unstable aircraft in three dimensions, and realised that banking, just like a bicycle going around a turn, was a possible way to get to that control. That, and wing-warping as a means of control, inspired by fidgetting with a bycicle inner tube, were two of their innovations that were essential to their success.
See the section on the wikipedia article on “Ideas about control”:
And Einstein was “just a patent clerk who came up with Special Relativity”.
No. He was a physics graduate who took a job as a patent clerk to have time to work on his ideas.
Often these legends are distortions of history that try to make the result seem more impressive. I’m not sure where they come from - probably “telephone game” type distortions in the retelling.
I was just about to post that I have a vague memory of a TV movie from the 70s, but now I think that’s likely the one. I’m sure it’s very 70s and could do with an eight episode TV series spruce-up.
The usual definition of a Hollywood film explicitly excludes made-for-television movies. That may be cracking in this era of streaming, but was definitely, pun intended, true in 1978.
The Wright brothers really didn’t finish high school, though.
I think it’s important to distinguish two different concepts. There’s a certain strain of anti-intellectualism that looks to cases like the Wright brothers as an example to bolster the case that you don’t need books and knowledge and all that stuff to accomplish things, just good old common sense and grit. That’s a fairly poisonous view and wrong to boot, since the Wright brothers took a highly scientific approach and learned as much as they could about aeronautics in the process.
Closely related but distinct, however, is anti-credentialism, which is wholesome and good: the idea that you don’t need some piece of paper that indicates mastery of a subject. You can just go and master it. And the Wright brothers do bolster the case for anti-credentialism. If the world was shocked that a couple of bicycle mechanics could invent a working airplane, it’s because they were suffering under the illusion that the only way to learn this stuff is to get a degree, or maybe climb some bureaucratic ladder, as opposed to actually doing the concrete steps needed to gain knowledge, such as running experiments.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t value in going to school, either. But “going to school” and “getting an education” aren’t synonymous, despite being used that way almost all the time.