Review: The Boy Genius and the Mogul

Daniel Stashower's The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television recounts the invention and the commercialization of television.

It's an amazing story, pitting a remarkable young man named Philo T. Farnsworth, who came up with the essential ideas of television while still in high school in Utah, against David Sarnoff, the autocratic head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

In the early 1920s, with the success of radio assured, inventors turned to the idea of "audiovision," "telephonography," or "television." Most of them focused on mechanical means, most notably the "Nipkow disk" invented by Paul Nipkow, which shone light through perforations in a spinning disk to project areas of light and dark.

Farnsworth, almost alone, believed that the mechanical approach would never work with the sheer amont of information to be broadcast. The key, he thought, was developing a system using no moving parts -- an entirely electronic system relying on a cathode-ray tube.

Sarnoff, our mogul, was hailed as the "godfather of television" in the medium's early days, but actually took some actions that delayed the commercialization of TV while embroiled in a patent controversy with Farnsworth. Eventually, Farnsworth would become the only person paid royalties by RCA, of which Sarnoff bragged, "We don't pay royalties; we collect them." By that time, though, Farnsworth's personal life had cratered, as the constant financial stress led to depression and alcoholism.

The author is a distant relative of Hugo Gernsback, the "father of science fiction" and inspiration of the Hugo award, and he livens up the narrative with quotes from Gernsback's speculative fiction magazines, and as the fictional became real, some of his enthusiast magazines, like Radio News, Electrical Experimenter, and finally All About Television.