the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

112 THE STORY OF TELEVISION
of good tubes produced
in the Farnsworth laboratories was
somewhat higher than that in some other more prominent
American and foreign laboratories. 1
The pursuit of sensitivity in the dissector tube led Farnsworth
into many avenues of research, because he recognized
it was the bottleneck of television. Among other things, he
sought ways and means of increasing the electrical signal generated
within the dissector tube before it left the envelope. The
research in this followed two major
lines: one was that of storing
up the electrons on the individual points of the cathode surface
during the thirtieth of a second consumed in scanning each
frame; the other was the use of secondary emission properties
of metals to build the signal before it left the tube. These two
methods will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.
1
The Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation laboratory has installed an
air-conditioned room in which to build these tubes; this has greatly reduced the
wastage.