the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

12O
THE STORY OF TELEVISION
A short-wave engineer was put to work to prove
it out over
the air. This proof was never achieved, though a great amount
of effort was expended on it over many tedious months of testing
and experiment. It was one of the big failures in Farnsworth's
development work, and it later became a source of
considerable embarrassment. While it has not yet been proved
by anyone to my knowledge that there is an error in the mathematical
calculations, the thing did not work, and it has never
been made to work. No one ever approached a problem more
earnestly or with more sincerity, or spent more intensive effort
to find a successful conclusion, than did Farnsworth. The
theory worked in a test demonstration over wires, but somewhere
along the line Phil felt that there was a fundamental
fallacy which prevented his getting results in sending the signal
through the ether. It was a bitter disappointment to him, both
from the practical standpoint and from the standpoint that his
genius for mathematics had failed him.
Farnsworth never sought the solution of a problem exclusively
in one direction. He always
had alternate schemes in
his mind if one should fail. He had a happy faculty of forgetting
failure and looking about for new ways to succeed. As one alternative
he had studied the possibility
of its transmission over
telephone wires for the short distance between the substation
central and the home phone. He felt that the attenuation of
the signal over the ordinary wire would not be sufficiently great
to prevent its being sent from the central's location into homes
in the neighborhood.
To test this theory a room was leased on one of the upper
floors of the Hobart Building in San Francisco, about a mile
distant from the lab, which necessitated the signal's passing
through two telephone exchanges. Test receiving apparatus
was installed and the telephone connection made with 202