Each peppered him with questions, including whether his invention could be painful. While viewers and audience members were let in on his secret, panelists Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Faye Emerson, and Henry Morgan were in the dark. They approached him … it just hit him right, I guess, so he agreed.”įarnsworth was introduced as “Doctor X,” a man who invented something at age 14. “A lot of programs like What’s My Line and all these wanted him to be on television,” she said. The program was I’ve Got a Secret, a primetime game show in which guests answered questions from a celebrity panel who were making an effort to guess their secret.Īccording to Farnsworth’s widow Elma, I’ve Got a Secret and similar shows had been after Farnsworth for some time, presumably owing to his stature as one of the reasons the programs existed in the first place. When it finally happened in July 1957, it only reinforced the notion of Farnworth as TV’s forgotten man.
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Actually appearing on TV was likely the last thing on his mind. He drank to excess and, at one point, committed himself to a sanitarium. Farnsworth watched nearby on a department store television.ĭespite being financially secure, Farnsworth felt erased from television’s picture. At the 1939 World’s Fair, it was Sarnoff taking a victory lap and introducing television to the public. Not being agreeable to corporate overtures early in his career cost Farnsworth his due credit, at least in the eyes of the American public. Inventing was fun the cutthroat business world was not.ĭespite Farnsworth’s years of toil, it was RCA head David Zarnoff who boasted of perfecting the box that would soon be the centerpiece of American home life. While the two eventually came to an agreement-RCA began marketing the first consumer TV after paying Farnsworth $1 million for his patents in 1939-he was embittered by the whole experience. That ingenuity also put him in the crosshairs of RCA, which claimed they held a patent on a similar concept. While far from the only mind to contribute to what would become the television, his work came at a crucial point in the 20th century. A decade after Farnsworth’s juvenile epiphany, the inventor patented his approach to television, which used electronic rather than mechanical means of transmitting images.
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