His Vision Made Television
The True Story of a Boy Who Had a Big Idea and Followed It Through to Final Success
By ELLIOTT ARNOLD
HE only trouble with Philo T. Farnsworth’s story is that it is out of time. It belongs to another day. It ought to be a hoary legend now and it’s just twenty years old and still in the making.
It has everything the school teachers love —boyhood on a farm, the dreamy inventor, the years of struggle, success. It’s the story of television and it all took place when folks whose names slip the mind for the moment did a lot of shouting about the frontiers being gone.
Farnsworth dreamed of television without moving parts when he was thirteen; a year later, still in high school, he invented some of the basic parts of electronic television. In 1927, when he was twenty, he took out his first patent, on an entire television system—not just one part—and Donald K. Lippincott, the radio engineer, called him “one of the ten greatest mathematical wizards of the day.”
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Coming_the Radio that Was Shot from a Gun
The tiny elements used in a great war invention are now ready to go to work in civilian transceivers.
By Harland Manchester
CARRYING a complete broadcasting station in the palm of his hand, a radio engineer walked out of his laboratory at the Bureau of Standards in Washington the other day, talking as he went down the stairs and out of the building. His voice came to us from a loudspeaker in the room he had left, as clearly as if he were still there. His transmitter, containing microphone, tubes, circuits, batteries, and aerial, was enclosed in a plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
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This is an interesting harbinger of the huge wave changes that occurred in the electronics industry in the 50 years after this article was published. What they’ve done here is essentially modularized an entire radio into plug and play components. Their reason for doing this was to make repair simpler, but now everything is designed that way so you can use standardized components and simplify assembly. If hundreds of different devices uses the same oscillator (or Ethernet controller for that matter) you can make them a lot cheaper.
Mother Could Fix This Radio
PSM photos by Robert F. Smith
YOU don’t need to know a coil from a condenser to fix this radio. Throw-away units, as easy to change as radio tubes, contain practically everything that might go wrong in the set. Six “canned” circuits with pronged bases, designed to retail in department stores at $1.85 apiece, replace the maze of wiring located in back of the dial of a conventional radio.
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This device was also highlighted in Modern Mechanix (Ionic Breeze ‘38)
Electrical Air Cleaning
Air almost 100 percent free from dirt particles and other substances is obtained when it is passed through a new electrostatic air filter. The device charges the particles which then cling to magnetic plates through which the air is passed. The result is absolutely or relatively absolutely pure air and a new method of relief for those suffering with ailments that are aggravated by foreign matter of any kind in the air. The operation of the device is so perfect that in operation it will even remove smoke from the air. Its effectiveness is shown in the illustration of the demonstration model.
Speeders Are Timed By Robot Cop
RUTHLESS speeders, driving with one eye on the rear vision mirror for signs of a trailing traffic officer, now have a new enemy to watch out for, a robot speed meter which instantly gauges the speed of a car on the highway.
The speed meter is small, and can easily be moved from one place to another. On one side of the road is an apparatus which directs two parallel beams of light, invisible to the driver, upon a mechanism on the opposite side of the road. The length of time taken by a car to intercept both beams of light is shown in terms of miles per hour on the meter.
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