Distant Vision

“That’s it, folks! We’ve done it! There you have electronic television.”

Philo T. Farnsworth, San Francisco, September 7, 1927

The cover of Distant Vision.

Distant Vision

Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier

by Elma G. “Pem” Farnsworth

Philo T. Farnsworth’s all-electronic television ranks with Edison’s phonograph and Bell’s telephone. His contributions to our culture have forever transformed the way we live. This book tells the story of a dreamer blessed with the ability to make his dreams come true.

Paperback and Kindle, coming soon to Amazon.

From Chapter 9, A Picture

With everyone standing around the receiver, Phil called instructions to Cliff, who was in the next room with the Dissector setup.

“Put in the slide, Cliff,” Phil called out.

“OK, it’s in. Can you see it?” Cliff called back.

An unmistakable line appeared across the small bluish square of light on the end of the Oscillite tube. It was pretty fuzzy, but Phil adjusted the focusing coil, and the line became well defined.

Two early Image Dissector camera tubes, 1927.
The Image Dissectors, 1927. The one on the left is the one used in the first all-electronic television transmission.

“Turn the slide a quarter turn, Cliff,” Phil instructed. Sure enough, the received line followed suit, turning 90 degrees.

“That’s it, folks! We’ve done it! There you have electronic television,” Phil announced, with a trace of a tremor in his voice. He hurried in to the transmitter to give Cliff a chance to see this historic transmission.

Everyone stood glued to the spot, the import of what we were seeing slowly sinking in. This was it, all right: there was a raster, with moving picture present. When Cliff saw it, his response was a characteristic, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

“What do you know!” Carl Christensen commented dryly. “If I wasn’t seeing it with my own two eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.”

I was jumping up and down in my youthful exuberance.

Philo T. Farnsworth at work beside his Image Dissector camera at the Crocker laboratory, San Francisco.
Phil with the Image Dissector and camera at the Crocker laboratory, 202 Green Street, San Francisco.
Pem and Phil Farnsworth seated side by side in the late 1920s.
Pem and Phil, from Phil’s 1927 laboratory journal.

Pem

Elma Gardner married Phil Farnsworth in Provo, Utah, in May 1926, and within months they were in San Francisco. She kept the laboratory’s books, drew its diagrams and stood beside the young crew the morning the first picture came through.

After Phil died in 1971 she spent the rest of her life seeing that he was remembered. Distant Vision is her account of their life together, told in her own words.