the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

208 THE STORY OF TELEVISION
detail and sensitivity that he had set for himself. As is
typical
of inventive genius, he wanted to work out the detailed refinements
by some new spectacular approach, rather than through
the more tedious method of routine engineering. He seemed
unable to recognize fully the merits of what he had achieved and
to be unwilling to apply
the skillful and
necessary to get the maximum practical
patient engineering
results from his inventions.
This attitude on his part permeated the Philadelphia
organization. It seemed to Mr. McCargar and me to be utterly
impossible to keep experimental hands off the equipment that
was specifically set up for the purpose of producing the maximum
performance that could be achieved by our scientific developments
to date.
Two engineers, Bart Molinari and George Sleeper, working
independently in the San Francisco laboratories, were fortunately
far enough away from this influence to have proper appreciation
of the equipment developed up to that time. They
were particularly enthusiastic about the dissector tube and had
the patience to do the monotonous engineering required to
achieve the best possible performance. Working alone,
they
developed a television camera of beautiful and efficient design
around the dissector tube. They got most of the bugs out of the
auxiliary equipment and stabilized the circuits to insure dependable
operation.
Two of the harassing difficulties met at this juncture were
a so-called "S" distortion and the pincushion effect in the picture.
These two irregularities were primarily due to the electromagnetic
fields of the deflecting or scanning
coils. The "S"
distortion put a wave in the scanning line so that there was a
sort of hump in the middle of the picture. The pincushion effect
gave the impression that the picture was stretched at each
corner.