Example of Research Notes
Before you begin your research review the project details.
Example of Research Notes for Philo T. Farnsworth and the Invention of the Electronic Television
From Big Chalk Library
Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television; Boylan, James;
Columbia Journalism Review; ; ; Jan 01, 2002; 79;
Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television
Byline: Boylan, James
Volume: 40
Number: 5
ISSN: 0010194X
Publication Date: 01-01-2002
Page: 79
Type: Periodical
Language: English
PHILO T. FARNSWORTH: THE FATHER OF TELEVISION By Donald G. Godfrey The University of Utah Press. 307 pp. $30
Even today, after belated recognition and the issuance of a
postage stamp bearing his likeness, Philo T. Farnsworth is not a household
name. Less than Marconi or even the other television pioneer Vladimir K. Zworykin,
Farnsworth has remained outside the boundaries of the fame machine. This thorough
if laborious biography makes clear why: Farnsworth was born an outsider and
remained one. Growing up in rural obscurity in Utah, he began as a teenager
to develop his ideas on electronic television (as opposed to the mechanical
gadgetry of other early versions), filed for the first of 130 patents when
he was twenty years old, and burned himself out over the next four decades
trying to win business success while engaged in a David-Goliath patent war
with RCA. He was a talented inventor with a legitimate claim to have fathered
TV, not cut out to be a celebrity or legal warrior or businessman, and his
health collapsed repeatedly before he died in 1971. The biographer, a telecommunication
scholar at Arizona State, was aided by Farnsworth's widow, who lived to see
her husband receive deserved credit for his innovative work.
Copyright Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism Jan/Feb 2002
From the Book, The Boy Who Invented Television, by Paul Schatzkin
But it's true. In the summer of 1921, at the age of 14, while plowing a field
near Rigby Idaho, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth was struck with an inspiration
that is still with us today. In fact, the screen you are looking at is directly
descended from that moment in the potato field...
As a young boy growing up on the frontier, Farnsworth marveled at the inventions of Edison and Bell. At the age of 6, he confided in his father his heart's desire, that he had been "born an inventor." By 12 he was was demonstrating a natural affinity for all things electrical.
Late one night, hidden away in his attic loft with a stack of old electrical magazines the aspiring inventor encountered the fanciful notion of "pictures that could fly through the air" by radio waves - and imagine that he had stumbled upon a problem that he might be uniquely suited to solving.
As he continued reading, Farnsworth learned of the earliest attempts to transmit moving images: ungainly machines that used spinning disks and mirrors to decompose an image into tiny bits of electrical current. He recognized immediately that these contraptions would never attain the speeds necessary to transmit a coherent moving image.
As he continued his studies, Philo learned about the tiny, subatomic particles called electrons, about how they could be manipulated by magnets, about photoelectric substances that could convert light into electricity and back again, and about a device called a "cathode ray tube" that combined some of these .... and he began to wonder how they could all work together to form a system of television with no mechanical parts at all.
One steamy day in the summer of 1921, Philo criss-crossed an open field atop a horse drawn plowing machine, thinking about television to relieve the boredom, when for a moment, he stopped to survey his day's work. Noticing the neatly cut parallel rows in the dirt before him, he was struck with a flash of inspiration: just as he plowed the field, back and forth in parallel rows, so could he scan an image, one line at a time, with a magnetically-deflected beam of electrons inside a cathode ray tube.
At that moment, television as we know it - and all its extensions and futher manifestations (like this computer screen) arrived on earth in the mind of this 14-year-old farm boy.
A few months later, as the idea continued to take shape in the boy's mind, he drew a sketch of it for his high-school science teacher. Four years after that, providence provided some funding for his idea. 20-year-old Farnsworth married his 19-year-old sweetheart and together they set up shop in a loft at the foot of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. One year later, on September 7, 1927, Farnsworth and his tiny "lab gang" performed their first successul experiments, transmitting the simple image of a straight line; as long as he could see if the line was horizontal or vertical, he knew that information was being transmitted from the bottom of one bottle to the bottom of another - proving the principle that struck him that day in the hayfield.
In 1930, Farnsworth was granted patents for the ideas that still form the very heart of every video system in use in the world today. Throughout the 1930s, he struggled against his most formidable competitors, David Sarnoff and the Radio Corporation of America, to hold on to his patents even as he continued to perfect his invention.In 1939, RCA capitulated, and agreed for the first time in its corporate history to a license that required the company to pay royalties for the use of Farnsworth's patents.
The introduction of television was stalled while the nation devoted its technical might to winning the Second World War, but by the late 1940s television swept the nation and the world. Ironically, it was just about this time that the name of its principal inventor vanished into obscurity.
Still the achivement cannot be denied. Without Farnsworth's ingenious, seminal contributions, there might still be no television or video today. As Johnny Carson joked, "if it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, we might still be eating frozen 'radio dinners'." But now we have a chance to overcome this unfortunate historical oversight.
From the Website, http://philo75.com/