Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome to 100 Years of Television. This is episode number 18, countdown number 89. The eye can see clearly now for 100 weeks that started in October 2025.
This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of of the day Television as we know it was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode we talked about how the research that had gone into the race for television in the 1930s was was instrumental in the Allies victory in World War II.
Today we're going to talk about a big technical improvement that came about just in time for the television boom that came after World War II.
After its false dawn from 1939 to 1941, one of television's first steps out of its post war crib was the telecast of a heavyweight title fight between reigning champion Joe Louis and and challenger Billy Kahn on June 19, 1946.
Lewis retained his title with a knockout in the eighth round. But what makes the event noteworthy is not the fight itself, but the camera tube that NBC used for the first time for this particular broadcast. The image orthicon.
Despite the race to bring it to market, television was barely viable before the war.
The camera tubes of the day were hardly up to the task.
RCA's Iconoscope delivered a usable signal, but that signal came with a lot of noise, poor contrast, and required either bright daylight or unbearably bright studio lights.
The images from Farnsworth's image dissector were cleaner and more stable than those of the iconoscope, but the tube was far less sensitive and also required a veritable flood of interior lighting.
Between 1937 and 39, RCA arrived at a breakthrough when engineers at the Camden, New Jersey laboratory, primarily Albert Rose, E. G Ramberg, and Harold Law, developed a camera tube that offered both improved sensitivity and image fidelity.
RCA's new tube bore little resemblance to Zworkin's Iconoscope, but RCA insisted on calling it the Orthoconoscope, adding the Greek prefix meaning straight to the older tube's name. For the sake of marketing continuity, the name was eventually shortened to Orthicon, but like everything else, the development ceased at the start of the war.
The image orthicon was a further improvement, and arguably the video camera tube that changed everything in the mid-1940s.
To understand why the image orthicon succeeded where its predecessors struggled, and at the risk of getting overly technical, I'm going to describe its internal architecture, which consists of four major an electrical image, a charge storage target, a low velocity scanning beam, and a secondary emission electron multiplier.
Of those four elements, three derive largely from Philo Farnsworth's work.
First, the Scene to Be Televised begins its journey from photons to electrons by landing on a light sensitive surface that forms an electrical image, the breakthrough concept defined in Farnsworth's first patents, filed in 1927.
After being momentarily stored in a second element about which more In a moment, the charge pattern is scanned by a low velocity electron beam, something Farnsworth introduced in patents related to the image dissector in the 1930s.
Then the signal from the low velocity scan is amplified in an electron multiplier, a configuration that uses the physics of secondary electron emissions that Farnsworth also began experimenting with in the 1930s.
The only major component of the image orthicon not derived from Farnsworth's work is a target plate capable of momentarily storing the charge pattern, a principle Adapted in both RCA's Iconoscope and Orthicon tubes but developed independently in the 1920s by the Hungarian physicist Kalman Tiani.
So the image orthicon, the tube that delivered so many of the iconic television images of the 1940s and 50s, is based largely on Farnsworth's innovations, albeit with crucial development and refinement by RCA's engineers.
Even the name of the new camera tube was derived from its two predecessors. The image part of the name is derived from the image dissector because the first element of the tube converts light into electrons in precisely the manner described in Farnsworth's first patents.
The orthicon part of the name derives from RCA's lexicon.
The sequence of events during these years is fuzzy, but this much seems certain.
By 1939, RCA was existentially over invested in the launch of television.
But even as David Sarnoff added sight to sound at the New York World's Fair, the company still refused to acknowledge or license the Farnsworth patents that made the new medium possible.
Farnsworth's improved image to sector patent dated back to 1933. RCA's work on the Orthicons began between 1937 and 1939.
We can only imagine the consternation facing RCA's patent attorneys when they discovered that one of the critical elements of the new tubes that the low velocity electron scanning beam was previously covered by a Farnsworth patent.
So it comes as no surprise that a few months after the World's Fair, RCA finally capitulated to Farnsworth and accepted a license for the use of his patents.
But wait, there's more.
By the time RCA accepted a license from Farnsworth, the patent office had been dealing for the better part of a decade with the company's aggressive pay, no royalties strategy.
One patent officer was so fed up that he told Farnsworth's attorneys that in addition to the patent rights for the image orthicon, we'd have given you the name too, but that was covered by separate trademark provisions.
So we come to July 1946.
The war has been over for nearly a year and the nation is converting its military production to civilian uses. Once again, thousands of highly trained engineers, technicians and radio operators returned home with cutting edge knowledge in electronics, optics and signal processing.
These veterans found work with companies like rca, cbs, Dumont, General Electric and and dozens of other companies that were staking out claims in the new territory of television.
With the image orthicon, television finally had a reliable eye that could see clearly in the real world.
The technical barriers were cleared, the legal impediments were settled, and after that summer night in 1946, television antennas began appearing on rooftops all over the world.
This brings us to the end of number 89 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when we start getting into the programs that define the medium's early years, starting with the premiere of the Kraft Television Theater in May 1947.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, including an illustration and links to a video describing how the Image Orthicon works, aim your gizmo to100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Paul Schatzkin. And it's a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:09:38] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and hi. But ho ho ho. Who got to laugh at now.
