Most of you have never heard of Philo T. Farnsworth. Philo T. Farnsworth is famous for never getting credit for inventing the Television machine. I never thought Television was particularly interesting (either as a device, or in any other way), though I have to admit, the Television machine is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a 14 year old farm-boy Mormon. Even more impressive was his successful attempt to build a fusion machine.

Farnsworth, like all good inventors, took a workman like approach to nuclear fusion. Thousands of morons (as opposed to Mormons) in the scientific establishment have been trying for literally, decades, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, to achieve what Farnsworth did, using what amounts to a pile of junk. His solution is still considered pretty good, and if it were given a fair trial, it might even beat the billion dollar efforts out there in achieving break-even (aka as much fusion energy out as was put in). The Navy recently revived the idea in the form of “Polywell Fusion.” It’s so simple, anyone can build a Farnsworth Fusor in his basement; there are websites devoted to hobbyist efforts. Kids regularly build these things for science fair projects. That’s how dumb and easy they are. The most complicated thing about them is the vacuum pump they use.

The “big science” buffoons use magnetic confinement; a copy of a Soviet idea that never went anywhere. You end up with a giant toroidal machine, with megawatts of energy going to keep the fusion plasma contained in place. Farnsworth’s idea just used some rings of metal to more or less passively keep the ionized fluid in place. It’s such a simple device, you could construct one out of TV and refrigerator parts, with the electrostatic rings made of old coat hangers. Such machines are used commercially as neutron sources, as they produce lots of fusion reactions (though nowhere near breakeven thus far).

Farnsworth was probably the last great American inventor. I’d like to think there will be great inventing men to come after him, but I’m pretty sure it won’t happen here any more, as the continuity is gone. Independent inventing men like Edison, Tesla and the Maxim brothers are part of America’s tradition; Farnsworth was the last of the great ones. Now we think of men as inventors when they write some crap piece of software. Farnsworth was uneducated by modern lights; only a few years of college. He was an actual farm boy, and he thought of television while ploughing the fields. TV is a rastering process, like ploughing fields. Yet, he invented all manner of machines, as well as being an accomplished mathematician.

Why won’t there be any more like him? The tinkering mentality is gone. Guys from the midwest in the early 20th century were tinkerers who fixed things because they had to in those days. You can’t really understand physical reality by screwing around with CAD and computer models. You can only understand physical reality by, well, tinkering with it. My pal Rodrigo recently sent me a Tom Wolfe essay (about Intel’s Bob Noyce, primarily) which illustrates the point, and also demonstrates why modern bureaucratic space flight is such a galloping failure:

The engineers who fulfilled one of man’s most ancient dreams, that of traveling to the moon, came from the same background, the small towns of the Midwest and the West. After the triumph of Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first mortals to walk on the moon, NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, happened to remark in conversation: “This was the triumph of the squares. ” A reporter overheard him; and did the press ever have a time with that! But Paine had come up with a penetrating insight. As it says in the Book of Matthew, the last shall be first. It was engineers from the supposedly backward and narrow-minded boondocks who had provided not only the genius but also the passion and the daring that won the space race and carried out John F. Kennedy’s exhortation, back in 1961. to put a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” The passion and the daring of these engineers was as remarkable as their talent. Time after time they had to shake off the meddling hands of timid souls from back east. The contribution of MIT to Project Mercury was minus one. The minus one was Jerome Wiesner of the MIT electronic research lab who was brought in by Kennedy as a special adviser to straighten out the space program when it seemed to be faltering early in 1961. Wiesner kept flinching when he saw what NASA’s boondockers were preparing to do. He tried to persuade to forfeit the manned space race to the Soviets and concentrate instead on unmanned scientific missions. The boondockers of Project Mercury, starting with the project’s director, Bob Gilruth, an aeronautical engineer from Nashwauk, Minnesota, dodged Wiesner for months, like moonshiners evading a roadblock, until they got astronaut Alan Shepard launched on the first Mercury mission. Who had time to waste on players as behind the times as Jerome Wiesner and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…out here on technology’s leading edge? Just why was it that small-town boys from the Middle West dominated the engineering frontiers? Noyce concluded it was because in a small town you became a technician, a tinker, an engineer, and an and inventor, by necessity.

Of course, Farnsworth was hounded by scumbags for most of his life. David Sarnoff, the evil weasel who founded NBC, and early patent troll, attempted to sue Farnsworth to penury. He ultimately failed in this endeavor, though the mind reels at the injustice of a towering genius like Farnsworth having to pay any attention to such nonsense. Who knows what wonders Farnsworth may have come up with had he been free to pursue his interests, rather than being tied up in pointless patent disputes with sleazeballs?

Consider Philo Farnsworth the next time someone tells you we live in an era of scientific progress. Where are our Philo Farnsworths today? They certainly aren’t laboring in a make work program in some government lab, nor do they seem to be inventing anything particularly interesting.



http://www.rexresearch.com/farnsworth/fusor.htm#advanced

http://www.philotfarnsworth.com/

http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-intro.html

https://www.neco.navy.mil/synopsis_file/N6893609C0125%20_Redacted_JA.pdf (the navy can’t update their security certs, apparently).