About This Episode
Was Nikola Tesla erased from history? Did Philo Farnsworth invent television before RCA claimed credit? In this revealing interview, Paul Schatzkin—biographer, researcher, and author—explores how revolutionary inventors like Nikola Tesla and Philo T. Farnsworth were sidelined by powerful corporate and political forces. We dive deep into: Why Tesla’s technology was considered too disruptive - The true story of Farnsworth and the invention of television - How RCA and David Sarnoff buried Farnsworth's contributions - The pattern of suppressing innovation that threatens power structures - What it means when genius is marginalized in favor of control This is not just hidden history—it's a direct look into how the system determines which ideas shape our world and which are buried. Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/J8lKmzEklUo
Full Transcript
[Music] The point that I keep making when I get into this is what has been lost to history because of the way television was absorbed into the culture and the economy which is what my book is about. Um what we have lost is that video all this screen technology that dominates our world now comes from the same well of cosmic knowledge as nuclear energy and atomic weapons. That's unbelievable that that Einstein's not only did he kind of coin quantum mechanics, but he it its derivatives led to television. It led to refrigeration, it led to so many things. And he was only 26 at the time. I think we all think of Einstein as like white-haired working on the Manhattan project, but in 1905 when he was publishing those papers, he was only 26 years old. And that just blows my mind to think about something. There's a lot of practical application that came out of the work that Einstein did that transformed the world. But I would I would argue and have have gotten support for this point that when when Farnsworth produces the first electronic video signal in 1927, that was the first practical application of all the knowledge that Einstein delivered in 1905. >> So he was kind of like the first quantum engineer because there might have been theoreticians, but he's actually creating things. He's engineering with it. >> When I got first got into this story, when I first got into the story about Pho, I thought of it in just those terms. Einstein was the brains. Farnsworth was the hands. >> Yeah. >> Wow. So, of course, they would have called him when it was time to build a bomb. It's like, you're the engineer. >> And he batted away. He said, "No." >> No. >> Wow. That's cool. >> Yeah. >> So, we'll go back to the hillside in in Santa Cruz. So, so Johnny videotape has explained the process of nuclear fusion and and the promise that it still holds today of a source of clean, safe, and virtually unlimited energy. Unlimited because the isotopes that produce it can be drawn from seawater and there's a lot of that. Then he tells me this apocryphal story. He describes a scene for me where the younger Farnsworth is standing outside of his father's laboratory while his father is working on this fantastic device, the star in a jar. Uh I I should back up for one second and explain that the riddle that's so compelling on all this is how do you bottle a star? What kind of container can you build where either the heat of the reaction doesn't destroy the container or the cool walls of the container extinguish the reaction? How do you bottle a star? That's the riddle of nuclear fusion that big science is still trying to figure out and has not. So now we're in this laboratory and this young man watches his father, the older man, achieve the dream. He sees the star in the jar.