[tubesrule]

Farnsworth was one of many people who devised and held key patents in early television development. To say he is solely responsible diminishes the contributions of people like Dr. Ray Kell, Kálmán Tihanyi, Vladimir Zwoykin, Alan Blumlein, etc.

While Farnsworth is generally credited with demonstrating the first all electronic television, his Image Dissector camera tube proved to be a dead end for normal television use, while Tihanyi's storage iconoscope (patented in 1926 prior to Farnsworth) proved to be the right solution. Farnsworth's Oscillite display tube also proved to be unworkable and all crt's to this day use Zworykin's kinescope design of 1929.

All scientific endeavor is built on the back of prior knowledge in the art. Without Paul Nipkow, would Farnsworth or anyone else have thought of scanning? Of course they would have, Nipkow just got there first. Which brings up one of the biggest myths about Farnsworth and the story of him plowing a field and noticing the plowed rows. Upon viewing this he is said to have had the eureka moment that he could scan an image like this. Now it is known that he was a voracious reader of scientific magazines and scanning was already know at the time (Nipkow 1884) so this is just one of those larger than life stories that keeps getting repeated.

There are many very poor web sites on the internet on this subject. Unfortunately personal opinion's and prejudices are usually presented as fact on these sites which leads to much misinformation. To wrap this invention up in a nice, tidy little package makes for great story telling, but does not represent the historical facts. If you dig enough, you can discover all the great people that contributed to developing television to what it is today, including but not limited to Farnsworth.

Darryl