the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

68 THE STORY OF TELEVISION
Mr. Bishop acted as chairman of the meeting. He asked
Farnsworth to outline the method of procedure he thought
necessary to pursue the work he had in mind. In simple terms
Phil gave a general sketch of his television scheme, emphasizing
in particular the absence of moving parts in the system. Because
he was completely self-assured and modest in his presentation,
Farnsworth made an excellent impression.
There has always been some quality about Phil that has enabled
him to fire the imaginations of those with whom he talks
about his inventions. As he talked to the banking group his
expressions had a clarity which, coupled with a quality of obvious
genius, stimulated the enthusiasm of his listeners without
any apparent effort on his part. It became clear that the group
would back the invention.
Phil began by saying that he proposed to do for vision what
radio was doing so successfully for sound.
"It isn't a magic carpet where whole scenes are sent as a
unit instantaneously from one place to another. It is much
more complicated than that. We must tear the pictures down
into thousands of bits for transmission and then put the pieces
together again in perfect sequence at the viewing end. All this
must be done in split seconds in order to fool the eye."
"Hasn't this ever been done before" McCargar asked. "Television
is not a new art, is it"
"No," said Phil, "the concept of television goes back to the
discovery of the selenium cell, when they found that the electrical
resistance of this metal varied when varying light intensities
were focused on it. With this discovery
scientists first
conceived the idea of transmitting the varying light values of a
picture by electrical means. They thought that by scanning
an image by some mechanical means they might be able to pick
it
up a point at a time, transmit the varying intensities one by