KEY POINTS:
It's fitting that just as television faces its biggest threat, in the form of the internet, tribute is being paid to the man who kicked the TV revolution off 80 years ago.
Not many people know the name Philo T. Farnsworth, but if I was to tell you
that in 1938, the American inventor was granted a patent for the cathode ray tube, you'd likely twig to the man's importance in the history of technology.
Most New Zealand homes still have a cathode ray tube in the corner of the lounge, though the technology that has seen audiences through decades of TV watching, first in black and white, then colour, is now obsolete. Flat panel TVs - plasma, liquid crystal and even the new organic light-emitting diode displays - are all the rage, the former two selling like hotcakes as consumers upgrade to receive high-definition images.
A Utah schoolboy in the early 1920s, Farnsworth sketched for his science teacher a plan that was effectively a blueprint for the first electronic-scanning television. By 1927 he had a working prototype to show to journalists in San Francisco.
He used an image dissector to record a picture electronically with a camera then sent the image wirelessly to a cathode ray tube receiver. A small, hazy black-and-white picture was the first TV image. But Farnsworth's invention formed the groundwork on which modern TVs are based.
You'd think, then, that he would have enjoyed all the fame and wealth such an invention would bring. Instead he died in obscurity and poverty in 1971, a casualty of the race started in the 1920s by major US corporations to secure the future of TV for themselves. At the time they didn't quite know what to do with this new "gadget" but they knew one thing - if TV was going to be as powerful as radio, it was worth bending the rules to get it.
The history of television is unusual material for a Broadway play, but that's what The Farnsworth Invention, by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, explores. I saw it last week at New York's Music Box theatre. It's a fitting tribute to Farnsworth's brilliance and tragedy.
Adept at turning the everyday workings of the White House into gripping drama, Sorkin has crafted an intriguing story out of the battle between the naive inventor and David Sarnoff, the unscrupulous head of the Radio Corporation of America, who also had his engineers working frantically on television but was behind in the race to invent a viable form.
It's a gripping show, helped by Sorkin's great dialogue and the talents of Hank Azaria in the role of Sarnoff and Jimmi Simpson as Farnsworth.
It's a story of industrial espionage. Sarnoff sends his key engineer, Vladimir Zworykin, to Farnsworth's labs for a "friendly visit" and has RCA secretaries carouse with Farnsworth's colleagues to glean details about the invention. By 1930 RCA knew what gave Farnsworth the edge in the race for television.
The following legal battle over patents between Farnsworth and Sandoff forms the powerful climax of The Farnsworth Experiment - RCA was ultimately able to claim some important patents and by 1939 Sarnoff, who founded NBC 13 years earlier, launched the first commercially available televisions.
The rest is history, or as the producers of The Farnsworth Experiment put it: "The turning point of the 20th Century wasn't on television. It was television."
Farnsworth went on to develop a fusion reactor and radar equipment, but didn't see a cut of the proceeds on the millions of televisions that sold through the 50s and 60s as TV captured the imagination of millions of Americans.
It's ironic that as the show opens on Broadway, NBC and Rupert Murdoch's Fox network are announcing the launch of Hulu.com, a website where viewers will be able to watch popular TV shows for free as video feeds, with the business supported by advertising.
There's an exodus of viewers from prime-time broadcast TV slots - they're heading for the web, which explains the determination with which TV networks around the world are climbing into online ventures such as YouTube.
