the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

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The Growth of Speculative Value
SHORTLY AFTER Condi's and my return from the El Paso and
Tucson campaigns late in 1926, Gorrell married and decided
to give up the roving life of a campaign organizer and settle
down in San Francisco. Here he secured a job as research analyst
for a brokerage house and got into the swing of the dying
gasps of the bull market in the era of beautiful nonsense.
One day a year or so later he took one of his former Stanford
schoolmates, who was now a stock salesman, down to the laboratory.
The stock salesman was immediately set on fire
by what
he saw. He visualized its great speculative possibilities
and set
about doing something about it. The first I heard of it was in
a letter which Gorrell wrote to me in Santa Ana, where I was
managing a campaign, telling
me that he had sold a tenth of
his 10 per cent of the Farnsworth company for $5,000. This
was heady
stuff for Gorrell. Some time later, when I returned
to San Francisco, I visited him in his office. He informed me
that the price of his holdings had doubled since he last wrote
me, and that he was going to sell a substantial portion of what
he had and try to make a real killing
in the market. The market
broke badly for him, and he lost heavily. As time went on he
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