The Secret History of Television: corporate power, patent law, and lone inventors.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture & Reviews - Book Review

HERE'S A STORY for you. Inspiration strikes a Mormon farmboy, the improbably named Philo T. Farnsworth, as he plows a potato field in Idaho. Armed with his new insight, he moves to L.A., finds investors and assistants, and on a shoestring invents television. A corporate giant tries to steal his creation, and along, expensive legal fight ensues. Farnsworth wins the battle but loses the war, successfully defending his claim to the patent but nonetheless watching most of the credit--and most of the profits--accrue to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and its self-aggrandizing chief, David Sarnoff. Farnsworth spends his last years chasing the dream of nuclear fusion, then dies poor, depressed, and virtually forgotten.

It's not a bad tale. Drain out the melodrama and sprinkle in some nuance, and you'll find it's actually true. The saga of Philo Farnsworth may have a special resonance in the dot-bust era, as battles rage over intellectual property and corporate turpitude dominates the headlines. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence that two books about Farnsworth have been published this year: Evan Schwartz's The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (HarperCollins) and Daniel Stashower's The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television (Broadway).

Either way, Farnsworth is reentering the inventor-hero pantheon. If he hasn't yet attained the stature of an Edison or a Tesla, he's still better known than, say, Nathan Stubble-field, radio's most forgotten founding father.

Farnsworth has even inspired a small backlash, spearheaded by the contrarian journalist Malcolm Gladwell. Writing in the May 27 New Yorker, Gladwell argues that Farnsworth's struggles with Sarnoff "are less straightforward than the cliches of the doomed inventor and the villainous mogul might suggest. Philo Farnsworth's travails make a rather strong case for big corporations, not against them."

Gladwell's argument is clever, accurate in its details, and ultimately silly.

He notes that, as an independent inventor backed with a fairly small stake, Farnsworth could not take advantage of the division of labor available to those on a corporate payroll. He had to be not just a scientist, but a manager, promoter, politician, and more--and the only one of those fields that he excelled at was the science. The result was constant uncertainty and frustration.

Gladwell further emphasizes that television, like other complex inventions, was not...