Defense Contracts
Farnsworth never wanted to build weapons. When the war turned his factories to military work, they made radios, direction finders and radar equipment, and afterward he put his own research into peaceful science.
A television company goes to war
In 1938 Farnsworth’s backers reorganized his research company as the Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation and went looking for factories. They bought the Capehart phonograph plant on Pontiac Street in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which opened under the Farnsworth name on March 14, 1939, and a radio plant in Marion. The company also bought Fort Wayne radio station WGL. The plan was to build television sets.
After Pearl Harbor, the War Production Board halted civilian radio and television manufacturing in April 1942 and turned the industry to military electronics. Farnsworth’s plants converted with it. By the end of the war the company was running seven factories in Indiana, including Fort Wayne, Marion, Bluffton and Huntington.
What the plants built
Most of the work was radio for the Army Signal Corps. The Fort Wayne plant built the BC-342 receiver used in the SCR-299, SCR-399 and SCR-499 mobile radio stations, the truck-mounted sets that carried long-range communications for armored divisions and field headquarters. An estimated 14,700 were built between 1942 and 1945.
The plants also built BC-312 and BC-344 receivers, BC-684 transmitters, and SCR-658 radio direction finders, which tracked weather balloons for forecasting. For the Navy, Farnsworth delivered underwater sound signaling equipment, vacuum tubes, and in late 1944 a run of radar conversion kits.
The research department also built electron multiplier tubes for infrared detection under a National Defense Research Committee contract.
No taste for weapons
The plants’ war work was overwhelmingly communications and detection equipment: the radios that kept units in touch, and the gear that located ships, aircraft and weather. Farnsworth himself spent much of the war away from Fort Wayne, at the family’s retreat in Maine.
Pem tells what happened there in Distant Vision. Early in the war, Stanford physicist David Webster flew his own plane from California to the Maine farm to recruit Phil for an important government research project in Chicago. Webster would not say what the work was, so Phil turned him down. Afterward he told Pem he suspected the military was building an atomic bomb. The Chicago work was part of what became the Manhattan Project.
“Phil was very interested in unleashing the power of the atom, but he had no interest in building a bomb.”Elma G. “Pem” Farnsworth, Distant Vision, chapter 24
After the war, nuclear science became the center of his work, on his own terms. In 1947 he discussed fusion with Albert Einstein, who urged him to pursue it for peaceful purposes. For the rest of his life Farnsworth talked about fusion as a source of clean, abundant power, and as the engine that would one day carry people to the stars.
After the war
Peace was hard on the company. It had borrowed heavily to expand for war production, military orders dried up, and Farnsworth’s core television patents were about to expire just as the television boom began. Worn down by years of litigation and illness, Farnsworth came back to Fort Wayne in 1949 and persuaded the investors to sell to International Telephone and Telegraph.
ITT kept the consumer business as Capehart-Farnsworth and set up the defense side as the Farnsworth Electronics Company in Fort Wayne. Farnsworth stayed on as head of research, and much of the lab’s work shifted to government contracts.
The Cold War lab
Farnsworth’s most important postwar product was the Iatron, a storage tube that held a radar picture on the screen and made it bright enough to read in daylight. Development began in 1949 under his personal direction, paid for mainly by the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships. Ordinary radar scopes had to be read in darkened rooms; the Iatron could sit in an aircraft cockpit or a control tower. The Federal Aviation Administration later tested Iatron projection displays for air traffic control, including at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center.
During the 1950s the lab also worked on submarine detection devices and an infrared telescope. Pem Farnsworth later described a device developed in the lab for the national early-warning system, meant to detect incoming planes and missiles. ITT’s Industrial Laboratories in Fort Wayne went on to design specialty tubes and sensors for government use for decades.
The same building also hosted Farnsworth’s fusion work. When ITT ended that program in 1967, Farnsworth left the company, and his years as a defense contractor ended with it.
The Fort Wayne plant’s defense work continues under L3Harris Technologies, which builds satellite instruments there and keeps a small Philo T. Farnsworth museum inside the facility.