Morrison warrants attention in his own right, but he also represents a host of geniuses whose groundbreaking work has either been crated up and left to gather dust in history’s warehouse or been overshadowed by other innovators. About half a dozen European and American inventors, for instance, patented the incandescent lightbulb years before Thomas Edison. One of them, John Starr from Ohio, is believed to have beaten Edison by decades. Electrical engineer Elisha Gray submitted his telephone patent several hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s attorney handed in Bell’s application on February 14, 1876, but Bell became the more famous of the two. Gray’s defenders argue that he lost out because an alcoholic Patent Office employee was bribed to ensure that Bell’s claim received priority. (Bell was also accused of later coming to the patent office himself, perusing Gray’s application, and then stealing concepts he later incorporated into his own design.) And more than two years before the Wright brothers briefly dipped and bobbed over the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, the Bridgeport Herald profiled a German-born immigrant named Gustave Whitehead who, according to the article, flew a motor-propelled airplane in Fairfield, Connecticut. Several witnesses later signed affidavits swearing that they, too, witnessed the August 1901 flight. Whitehead could have settled the question and possibly earned his chance at immortality had he, like the Wright brothers, captured his flight on film. (The true inventor of photography is also, of course, a matter of debate.)
William Morrison’s old basement laboratory, or “the Cave,” as he referred to it, used to be in the middle of Fifth Avenue, right between Locust Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Des Moines. I’m not complaining about my Vermont (or any other) hike, but every so often it’s nice to visit sites that don’t require contending with the threat of snakes, poison ivy, randy moose, or crashing tree limbs.
Joining me is local automobile historian Bill Jepsen, who self-published a terrific book titled Iowa’s Automobiles: An Entertaining and Enlightening History, which he spent twenty years writing. Bill has driven about an hour in from Boone, Iowa, to show me around Des Moines and share his file on Morrison, which is invaluable because there’s scant information on the man. Bill also deserves credit for actually finding the spot where Morrison worked.
“Were you always a car guy?” I ask Bill after he meets me outside of my hotel in his GMC truck.
“Well, I started out as a car kid,” he says, “sitting on the front steps of our Davenport home in the 1950s at the age of five or so trying to name cars as they drove by.”
Bill graduated from the University of Iowa in 1967, got drafted, and served in Vietnam, he tells me, as a “Remington Raider.” From my blank expression he can see that I have no clue what that means. “I sat behind a Remington typewriter and filled out reports and records,” he explains. On the GI Bill, he studied twentieth-century American history with plans of becoming a teacher, but he never got certified.
Bill and I approach Fifth Avenue, and there’s strong evidence that Morrison had an early model of his car up and running on this very street years before he officially introduced it to the world on September 4, 1890, during the city’s annual parade, Seni Om Sed. (Des Moines spelled backward. Sort of.) Spectators—up to a hundred thousand in all—clamored for a look at Morrison’s homegrown four-horsepower invention rolling down Walnut Street on steel-clad wooden wheels under a surreylike carriage. By far the event’s most popular attraction, the buggy was greeted by cheers and applause for the entire length of the route.
Scientific journals and gossip mags alike went dizzy over Morrison’s horseless carriage, prompting sixteen thousand letters to pour into his office from both well-wishers and oddballs around the world questioning how it worked, inquiring if they could get their own, and asking if he was married. (He was.) Overwhelmed by the onslaught, Morrison tossed out the letters but saved two whole bushel baskets’ worth of enclosed postage stamps.
What makes Morrison’s car all the more noteworthy is that it was electric. America’s first automobile ran on batteries, not fossil fuels. And the Morrison Electric, as he called it, wasn’t some one-time wonder constructed for his own driving pleasure; Morrison built a line of cars and sold them for $3,600 each. To promote the power and durability of rechargeable batteries, the American Battery Company bought one to exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, sparking national interest. Two years later, ABC entered a Morrison Electric in this country’s first automobile race. Unfortunately, and in a sign of things to come, it lost the fifty-four-mile contest to Frank and Charles Duryea’s gasoline-fueled automobile, the first of its kind in the United States. The Duryea brothers were also first to set up a car-manufacturing plant, followed by Ransom Olds, who patented the assembly-line process—not Henry Ford, as is commonly believed.
Ford considered producing electric cars, too, but his hero and (later in life) close friend Thomas Edison waved him off the idea after toying with it himself. “Electric cars must keep near to power stations,” Edison told Ford. “The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do, either, for they require a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.”
Initially, though, electric cars were all the rage. Some drove faster than their fuel-powered competitors, and they were less messy, quieter, and a cinch to start, requiring just the push of a button instead of a cumbersome hand crank. (Advertisers pitched these features to female drivers in particular.) The Electric Carriage and Wagon Company put an entire fleet of electric cabs on the streets of New York in 1897, and by 1899 electric vehicles were beginning to outsell cars with combustion engines. An electric taxi in Manhattan even earned the ignominious distinction of causing the first automobile fatality in America; on September 13, 1899, cabdriver Arthur Smith accidentally ran over a sixty-eight-year-old man named Henry Bliss at Seventy-Fourth Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. Bliss died at Roosevelt Hospital the next day.
Bill points out the spot we’re looking for on Fifth Avenue, and, as he parks, I jog up ahead to take pictures. After a few moments, I realize that the light-gray concrete building with red trim now houses some sort of daycare or educational center, and a teacher starts to peer out the large windows and is clearly wondering what this strange man with a camera is doing outside.
There’s no international hand sign for “I’m a history buff, not a weirdo,” so I gesture to her as best I can that I’m not photographing the classroom or any students. The teacher’s eyes narrow to a stern glare, and I slink off after snapping one more picture. I call over to Bill, “Okay, we should probably go.”
“That was fast.”
“Yup,” I say, trying not to seem too suspicious as I hustle out of view of the school window. “Got everything I need.”
Thomas Edison’s counsel to Henry Ford proved right in the end, and electric cars ultimately couldn’t beat out their fuel-guzzling competitors in the early 1900s for the same reasons they still haven’t entirely caught on today—they’re more expensive and they can’t go as far on a single charge as gas-powered cars can travel on a full tank. Their failure a century ago partly accounts for why Morrison himself has been forgotten.
Not that he’d have cared. “I wouldn’t give ten cents for an automobile for my own use,” Morrison told a reporter from the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1907. Despite his $5,000 boast about being first (a wager he would have lost to a number of other Europeans but to no American), Morrison wasn’t passionate enough about cars to go around embroiling himself in patent lawsuits. What interested him most were the batteries inside the vehicles, and before moving to California to try his hand at gold mining, he received eighty-seven patents, most of them related to battery storage. Little is known about his life out west except that he made a small fortune and then passed away in 1927. (The exact year of his birth isn’t known, but Morrison was in his mid- to late seventies when he died, and he was buried back in Des Moines.)
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br /> Morrison’s apathy about his accomplishments was the exception among early American inventors. All the rest seemed to be engaged in endless legal fights. Elisha Gray sued Alexander Graham Bell over the telephone. Bell got into a scrap with the Wright brothers over patented improvements to the airplane. Henry Ford duked it out with George Selden for hogging the automobile patent without putting it to use. And Nikola Tesla clashed with his former employer Thomas Edison over alternating and direct currents. Tesla also wrangled with Edison’s friend Guglielmo Marconi about who invented the radio, and their feud is proof of how confusing these cases can be. In 1903 the Patent Office sided with Marconi—after having first awarded the radio patent to Tesla three years earlier. Then, in a decision that stands to this day, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Patent Office’s reversal, giving Tesla final bragging rights. But he never knew of his victory, having died embittered and penniless in the New Yorker Hotel several months before the Court’s ruling.
Few of these wars, however, can compare with Philo Farnsworth’s David-versus-Goliath battle with RCA Communications concerning the patent for electronic television. That a lone, self-taught engineer from Rigby, Idaho—where I’m off to now—took on the world’s most powerful broadcasting company and won isn’t even the story’s most remarkable angle. What’s more compelling, I think, is that Farnsworth came up with the idea when he was only fourteen years old.
THE FARNSWORTH FARM
Nobody had it, nobody was close and lemme tell you nobody cared that much ’cause at best it was gonna be considered a nifty parlor trick. Nobody had it except a 14-year-old kid in Rigby, Idaho, standing in a field of potatoes. He rode a three-disc plow, drawn by a mule, making three parallel lines in the earth at once. Then three more. Then three more and three more until he was done with his work. He stepped off the plow, looked back at the rows and rows of parallel lines, and that’s when he realized the key to the most influential invention in history. So he did what any world-class electrical engineer would do in that situation: He went to see his 9th grade science teacher.
—From David Sarnoff’s monologue in The Farnsworth Invention (2007) by Aaron Sorkin. The character is based on the real RCA president and Farnsworth nemesis, David Sarnoff.
“JUSTIN TOLMAN WAS Philo Farnsworth’s science teacher,” Mike Miller tells me as we drive up to the newly renovated Rigby Junior High School, “and Tolman’s classroom would have been in the old building, which was torn down long ago.” The site is now an empty athletic field, with metal tackling dummies lined up on one end and soccer posts on the other.
Mike is a Rigby native and a sergeant in the sheriff’s department. When I first contacted the local museum, then the library, and finally the public school to find out where Philo Farnsworth lived ninety years ago, nobody could pinpoint the location, and everyone said the same thing: Call Sergeant Miller. He’ll know.
He didn’t, actually. Not right away. But he promised me he’d find out, and he’s come through.
Before we drive out to see where Farnsworth was raised, we pass by his old school. When the fall semester started in 1921, Farnsworth waited by the building’s front entrance to badger Justin Tolman into allowing him to attend his senior-level science class. At first Tolman wasn’t going to let a ninth-grader waltz into his honors course, but he finally relented, and after a few weeks he realized that Farnsworth had a better intuitive grasp of science than the older students, if not himself.
From the junior high school, Mike and I drive from downtown Rigby to our main destination—472 North 3700 East.
“I had to go through a lot of old records to verify the location,” Mike says, “but here’s where Farnsworth and his family moved to in early 1921. This is the farm where he had his revelation.” There’s no house there now, just an old feedlot.
Farnsworth’s father had brought his family to Idaho in 1919 from Provo, Utah, where Philo was born on August 19, 1906. They first stayed with relatives on a 240-acre ranch a few miles outside of Rigby, and young Farnsworth was ecstatic to discover that the house had electricity, a rarity then in rural America. When he stumbled on a pile of technology magazines, he was practically beside himself. One, Science and Invention, was running a contest to improve the Model T, and Farnsworth zeroed in on a bedeviling security problem. Since all Fords used an identical key, whoever possessed one could start—and steal—any car. Farnsworth proposed a simple, cost-effective method of magnetizing each key to make it unique. He won first prize.
Antitheft ignition locks were kids’ stuff compared with Farnsworth’s primary obsession: solving the technological riddle that would make television a reality. Russian engineer Constantin Perskyi introduced the word television (same spelling and everything) during a lecture he delivered in French at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, and he referenced the German technician Paul Nipkow’s idea of using hole-punctured spinning mechanical disks to convert images into electrical impulses and then send them through a wire to a second disk, which would project them onto a screen. Inventors throughout Europe and the United States tried to build on this “mechanical” model, but Farnsworth, who’d read about Nipkow, recognized its inherent limitations and knew that a radically different approach was needed.
During the summer of 1921, Farnsworth had learned that electrons could be beamed across a vacuum (or cathode) tube, undisturbed by air molecules that might otherwise cause distortion, and he wondered whether these rays, if properly manipulated, could project clear images onto a photoelectric screen at the other end of the tube. The problem was transmitting and capturing the pictures in their entirety, and this seemed technically impossible.
Like any restless and sensible young man, Farnsworth loathed the monotony of daily chores, but they did give him time to think. One morning before his fifteenth birthday, he was out plowing the family’s potato field when he took a short break. While looking back over the rows of freshly tilled earth, inspiration struck.
Lines.
Lines of electron rays, guided by magnets, could zigzag across the screen rapidly enough to fool the eye into believing it was watching a continuously moving image. No mechanical or optical spinning discs could accomplish this, ever. “Mechanical” television was a technological dead end. “Electronic” television, Farnsworth realized, was the answer.
He rushed home and explained the still-percolating breakthrough to his father, who didn’t have the faintest idea what Philo was talking about. But he gave his son memorable advice: “You need to keep this a secret, because everyone already thinks you’re a bit odd. This would convince them for sure.”
Six months later Farnsworth couldn’t hold out any longer and confided in Justin Tolman his idea for an integrated electronic television system, which included a rudimentary camera that Farnsworth called an “image dissector” and a cathode-ray tube (or receiving set), which is why some of us still refer to a TV set as “the tube.” Farnsworth breathlessly detailed to his science teacher how the components interacted, and he sketched the design on Tolman’s blackboard, then drew more detailed schematics on a sheet of notebook paper. Farnsworth asked his teacher if he had any reason to believe the principles involved were scientifically unsound. Awestruck, Tolman shook his head and encouraged Farnsworth to just “study like the devil and keep mum.”
Farnsworth’s next major obstacle was more practical than theoretical. He was broke. While established inventors working on television prototypes oversaw entire teams of scientists and engineers in well-equipped, corporate-funded laboratories, Farnsworth labored alone in the family attic piecing together whatever odds and ends he could salvage from Rigby’s junkyards and auto shops. And unlike his competitors, the teenage freshman had to ask his mom’s permission to work past bedtime.
Money proved so tight for the entire family that Farnsworth senior moved his wife and younger children back to Provo. Philo dropped out of school, took correspondence courses, scraped by in various low-paying jobs, and joined the Navy in 1924. (Tired of “Fido”
cracks, he dropped the o from his name and was henceforth Phil Farnsworth.) That same year his father passed away, and Farnsworth was granted an honorable discharge to care for his grieving mother in Provo.
Utah beckoned for another reason: Elma “Pem” Gardner, a spirited seventeen-year-old bombshell Farnsworth had fallen for who had a sharp mind and wasn’t put off by his impromptu soliloquies about the beauty of electromagnetic-wave transmissions. Pem was the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak period when Farnsworth, working as a street sweeper, constantly worried that at any moment another inventor would steal his thunder.
That seemed ever more likely in 1925. On June 13, Charles Francis Jenkins showcased his Radiovisor, which transmitted synchronized sound and pictures from a radio station in the nation’s capital. Jenkins had already established his engineering bona fides by helping to invent the Vitascope, a film projector marketed under Thomas Edison’s name. (Predictably, there was a spat over patent rights, which resulted in a $2,500 settlement to Jenkins.)
Around the same time Jenkins was rolling out the Radiovisor in Washington, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird was introducing something similar in England. On January 26, 1926, Baird repeated for the media in his London laboratory a demonstration he’d given staff members months earlier, broadcasting live images on his Televisor. That Baird didn’t harm anyone in the process was achievement enough; a one-man safety hazard, Baird had blown up a previous lab and nearly electrocuted himself in the process. As a young inventor, he reportedly caused a blackout in Glasgow after overwhelming the power supply by using large surges of electricity to convert graphite into diamonds. But despite their breakthroughs, Jenkins and Baird relied on a form of mechanical television that produced hazy images. Even Paul Nipkow had long abandoned the outdated technology.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 23
