People always ask me how does a teenager in a horse-drawn plow come up with the world’s first working all-electronic television system and it was simple. I was bored.
In 1921, I was fourteen years old, tilling a potato field in Idaho. I looked back at the neat, parallel rows I’d just plowed, and it hit me like a heavy clod of dirt). Why couldn’t we scan an image the same way? Line by line. Electronic beams moving back and forth across a vacuum tube, just like my plow moving across the dirt.
While most fourteen-year-olds were worrying about puberty or how to talk to girls, I was drawing diagrams for an image dissector on a blackboard for my high school chemistry teacher.
Fast forward a few years to San Francisco. I wasn’t exactly living the high life, I was basically a mad scientist in a rented lab, trying to prove that mechanical spinning disks (the television of the time) were a joke. Mechanical TV was clunky, loud, and looked like a moving shadow through a screen door.
In 1927, I finally did it. I transmitted a simple straight line using my video camera tube. My wife, Pem, was there. I turned to her and said, "There you are, honey. A line." and she was thrilled or as thrilled as one can be when their husband spends the grocery money on vacuum tubes and glass blowing. But that line was everything. It was the birth of the electronic age. It was the moment I built the world’s first working all-electronic television system. I figured I’d be a billionaire by Tuesday.
By 1930, I had the patents, but I also had a target on my back. A little company called RCA decided they didn't want to pay me and claimed their guy, Zworykin, invented it first.
We went to court. It was a mess. But remember that high school teacher? He had kept the drawing I made on the blackboard when I was fourteen. Long story short, I won. I am officially the guy who was granted the first patent for the television by the United States Government. Suck on it, RCA.
However, the world is a strange place. My technology, specifically the image dissector, ended up being used by the Germans to broadcast the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Imagine that. I’m sitting in my lab and halfway across the world, my invention is being used by Nazis to show Jesse Owens making them look like losers in high-definition (for the time).
Once television became a thing and commercials for soap and cigarettes started clogging up the airwaves, I got bored again. Also, I was tired of fighting lawyers. I moved on to something bigger. Something hotter, I invented a small nuclear fusion device called the Fusor.
While everyone else was trying to figure out how to make color TV work, I was in my basement trying to bottle the sun. I wanted to give the world clean, limitless energy. I wanted to fix the planet. Unfortunately, the world was more interested in watching I Love Lucy.
The Fusor technically worked, but it wasn’t the energy for everyone miracle I’d hoped for, still, you’re welcome, science.
In my later years, I became somewhat dependent on alcohol. Look, if you had spent your youth fighting corporate giants for the rights to your own brain, and your middle age trying to build a sun in your garage, you’d probably fancy a drink too.
Television had turned into a monster and by the 1960s, It wasn't the educational, world-uniting tool I had envisioned. It was a wasteland and I didn’t even let my own kids watch it much. The irony wasn't lost on me that I’d created a window to the world, and I didn't like the view.
Eventually, the lifestyle and the stress caught up with me. I became seriously ill with pneumonia and died which is a real drag when you’ve still got three or four more world-changing inventions in your head but what I left behind was a bit of a mixed bag really as i was the man who gave you the ability to watch a man walk on the moon from your living room, but I’m also the reason people know what a Kardashian is.
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