Orange County Register

Here at Pedro and the Watcher we like our TV — but you knew that already, didn’t you? We also like books, though, and so when a new children’s picture book on the inventor of television arrived in the mail we knew just what to do with it: Send it to Chris Farnsworth, former Orange County Register reporter, turned screenwriter and novelist, and best of all for our purposes here, the great-nephew of Philo T. Farnsworth, the guy who made all our TV joy possible. 

Here’s his review of  “The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth,” by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Greg Couch.

 Television is so much a part of our lives, kids probably think of it as something that comes with the house, like water from the kitchen sink. It’s almost like a natural resource, rather than something that was invented.

So Kathleen Krull’s got her work cut out for her in her book, “The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth.”  She’s got to explain a world without TV to an audience that’s grown up with 500-channel, flat-panel 40-inch HDTVs and TiVo. I don’t know how I’m going to do the same thing with my 17-month-old daughter, and we’ve got the advantage of being related to the inventor.

Philo T. Farnsworth was my great-uncle. He invented television when he was 14 years old. Just take a minute and think about what that really means. An Idaho farmboy designed, in his head, a system to take images and turn them into electronic signals to be transmitted over the air, while plowing a potato field. And he did this at a time when most of the people around him didn’t have indoor plumbing.

Yeah. Sort of puts your own science fair projects into perspective, doesn’t it? I still have trouble with the concept, and I grew up hearing my grandfather tell stories about his brother. (It didn’t help that Philo’s genius didn’t extend to self-promotion. When people are asked, “Who invented the lightbulb?” they say “Thomas Edison” because Thomas Edison spent a lot of money and effort making sure that was the only answer anyone would know.)

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