The Boy Genius and the Mogul by Daniel Stashower, Broadway Books, New York, $24.95, ISBN 0767907590
NO ONE invented television. It took a whole gang of people to make it possible. Paul Nipkow, Charles Francis Jenkins, Ernst Alexanderson and John Logie Baird favoured a spinning wheel or mirror drum. Short-term, limited success whetted the public’s appetite. A. A. Campbell Swinton, Boris Rosing, Vladimir Zworykin, Edouard Belin, Kenjiro Takayanagi and the EMI-Marconi team with Alan Blumlein all took the more difficult all-electronic route.
So did 15-year-old Idaho farmboy Philo Farnsworth, who began to plan a system with “no moving parts” in…
