Customer Reviews

Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery of an Invisible Frontier

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This is a loving biography of television pioneer Philo Farnsworth by his widow. Her affection and admiration for him do not allow for much admission of errors of judgement in technical, personal, or business matters. Still, the man's brilliance is clear, as well as the stubbornness which cost him so much.

This is principally a story of a man's life. There is little in the way of technical information or photographs of the technologies that Farnsworth invented and developed, nor are there references for the interested reader to follow up on. The writing is only fair. But the story and the man are interesting enough to fit this book in the library of popular inventors' biographies.

For everyone who has ever looked at television, you owe it to both yourself and the inventor to read this book!
Written from the perspective of one who knew the Father of Television almost better than he knew himself, his wife, Elma Gardner Farnsworth.
You get a widescreen look at how TV got its start right through production and even into some of Philo Farnsworth's other inventions.
This is a must read book! Why hasn't it been made into a made-for TV-movie yet??

Farnsworth is not a household name, but it should be. RCA did everything it could to obliderate the truth about who invented TV. RCA's top tech man visited the Farnsworth lab in SFran, and the boys at the lab, in Farnsworth's absence, went so far as to build a sample camera tube for RCA. This was built into RCA's development of TV. The book is part personal, part technical, and very revealing of how RCA tried to work around Farnsworth. In the end they paid the survivors handsomely for use of the patent in RCA TV products.