the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

56 THE STORY OF TELEVISION
He named his fee and said, "I'm afraid I will have to add to
that the amount of a fine for parking overtime, because I left
my car on the street and came up here feeling sure I could
throw this scheme into the discard in a half hour/'
A week later Phil and I visited Dr. Smith at the Cal Tech
laboratories. We found him more enthusiastic about the idea
than he had been at the first conference.
In Phil's memorandum covering his system
he had an alternate
scheme of scanning in which he proposed the use of a
quartz crystal. In our experiments with it we had called it the
"magic crystal." In the discussion at Pasadena Dr. Smith told
Phil that the mathematical background of the proposed operation
of the crystal was not quite clear. Phil said, "That dates
back to Hamilton's work in Dublin in 1886. Have you a textbook
on light"
Dr. Smith reached for one in the file of reference books on
the back of his desk.
"Turn to the chapter on coaxial crystals," Phil said.
Dr. Smith found the chapter and shoved the book over to
Phil, who thumbed through the chapter to where there were
two pages of mathematical formulae. Pointing to an equation
in the middle of the right-hand page, Phil said, "There it
it."
is."
Dr. Smith smiled and said, "You're right;
I should have seen
During the following week much time was given
to the discussion
of ways and means of getting additional financing.
Farnsworth was sure that a year's time and $12,000 in cash was
all
that would be required to enable him to produce a satisfactory
television picture. Later developments proved Farnsworth
to be the typical optimistic inventor, because it actually
took more than $1,000,000 in
money, and thirteen years intime,
before his invention was ready for commercialization. It