TV honors man who made TV

Somewhere tonight on your way between the refrigerator and the La-Z-Boy rocker, balancing the beverage and the bowl of potato chips, you might want to follow suit to this past weekend's Emmy broadcast and pay tribute to Philo T. "Phil" Farnsworth.

Philo Farnsworth is the farm boy who was born outside Beaver, Utah, moved to Idaho as a teenager, and at the age of 14 first envisioned the invention of "electronic television" when he gazed upon the rows of hay he'd just cut at the family farm in Rigby, Idaho.

By the time he was 21 he was in an upstairs loft in the North Beach section of San Francisco producing a single moving line that was mankind's first televised image.

As history records it, in the room with Philo that day at 202 Green St. were several investors, his brother-in-law and his wife, Pem, who did not once tell Philo to turn off that darn television and take out the garbage.

The date of that historic event, the precursor to everything from "Bonanza" to "Seinfeld" to Armstrong walking on the moon to "The Nashville Network," was Sept. 7, 1927 — 75 years ago this month.

In recognition of the 75th anniversary, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences feted Farnsworth's genius, if it did say so itself, at the Emmy broadcast this past Sunday night. The Academy brought in Pem Farnsworth, who is still alive at 94, from her Indiana home for the occasion. Her appearance may have been the high point of the three-hour-and-20-minute broadcast, which was OK as awards broadcasts go, but still not as exciting as that single moving line in San Francisco.

When the line actually moved on the tiny screen, one of the investors reportedly called another investor on the phone and said, simply, "The damn thing works."

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The 75th anniversary has prompted a new wave of attention for the Beaver farm kid — who was born, incidentally, just a couple of miles from where Robert LeRoy Parker was born 40 years earlier. Parker would become known as Butch Cassidy and make his own kind of mark on the world. For a sleepy farm town in southern Utah, Beaver has certainly made its presence known.

In the past 18 months, four new books — to go along with one Pem wrote in 1982 — have been written on Farnsworth, including the latest by Paul Schatzin, "The Boy That Invented Television," released on Sept. 7.

With varying approaches, the books all tell the same story of a gifted thinker who fought a bitter battle with electronic giant RCA Victor for his early television patents, not prevailing completely in court until a 1939 verdict required RCA to pay him $1 million for his patents.