{"id":1074,"date":"2006-03-02T20:02:22","date_gmt":"2006-03-03T01:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/wordpress\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2006-03-02T20:27:23","modified_gmt":"2006-03-03T01:27:23","slug":"digital-domain-and-jones-farnsworth-v-zworykin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/digital-domain-and-jones-farnsworth-v-zworykin\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Domain and Jones (Farnsworth v Zworykin)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just did a short talk with Randy Stross whose Digital Domain column (unfortunately in Times Select) in the NYTimes is doing a bit on Wikipedia. I get to say something like, &#8221; Of course, my collegues use Wikipedia. They are lying if they don&#8217;t admit it.&#8221; I also say that I require students to go to primary sources that Wikipedia isn&#8217;t a primary source. Neither is Britanica nor is World Book. Researchers should get to the  primary sources. <\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia does point you to great primary sources tho. And unlike say World Book, you can follow the discussions of articles in the Talk section of a Wikipedia article and disputed articles are clearly marked as such on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<p>I pointed him to the wonderful HG Wells (1937) article &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/sherlock.berkeley.edu\/wells\/world_brain.html\">World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia&#8221;<\/a> which pretty much describes Wikipedia within the technological contraints on the period.<\/p>\n<p>Then I expressed my doubts about the World Book entry on Television in our 1963 World Book. It&#8217;s so clearly<br \/>\nslanted toward RCA and Zworykin over Farnsworth. I say:<\/p>\n<p>The lengthy section on television in Vol. 17 has only this to say about Farnsworth (in context so you can see how Zworykin surrounds him):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;These first TV pictures were poor, because only a few impluses could be transmitted in a short time. A more efficient system was found in the earlier work of Vladimir Kosma Zworykin of the United States. In 1923, he filed a patent application on the <em>&#8216;iconoscope,&#8217; <\/em>an electron camera tube.<\/p>\n<p>Another American television pioneer, who conceived of a different electronic scanning system, was Philo T. Farnsworth. In 1922, while he was a sixteen-year-old high-school student, Franswroth described his idea to his physics teacher. The Patent Office later granted Farnsworth a patent on his <em>&#8216;image dissector,<\/em>&#8216; or camera tube. He also made other contoributions to television<\/p>\n<p>For the receiving end of television, in the 1920&#8217;s. Zworykin and others developed an electron tube called the kinescope. The picture picked up by the iconoscope is reproduced on the face of the kinescope. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Progress in the 1930&#8217;s.<\/strong> On July 30, 1930, the Radio Corporation of America and its subsidiary, the National Broadcasting Company began &#8230;.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What follows is much more on RCA in fact most of the rest of the history article is about RCA. Farnsworth is never mentioned again or before.<\/p>\n<p>There is also a table <em>&#8220;Famous First in Television&#8221;<\/em> in where there at two Zworykin references multiple RCA and NBC references and no mention of Farnsworth.<\/p>\n<p>The article is signed by Jack Gould and &#8220;Critically reviewed by Vladimir Kosma Zworykin and James Robertson&#8221; No more said about any of them but you see what happened to Farnsworth (and how Zworykin was made Amercian).<\/p>\n<p>Now the Farnsworth entry in volume 6. No picture. Two short paragraphs. Farnsworth was still alive then. Says he invented the dissector at 16 and 6 years later patented it. But years passed before any of his work was put into commercial use. &#8220;He licensed his important inventions to RCA and ATT.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Zworykin, the final full entry in the final volume 19, gets a picture (credited to RCA) and 5 paragraphs. &#8220;A Russian-born American physicist and electronics engineer. He is responsible for many technological advances in radio, television, and the electron microscope.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Compare wikipedia entries on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vladimir_Zworykin\">Zworykin<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Philo_Farnsworth\">Farnsworth.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The story that World Book carefully left out is clearly there. Wikipedia seems faired and more accurate and there are great links to <a href=\"http:\/\/philotfarnsworth.com\/philotfarnsworth\/index.html\">primary sources<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just did a short talk with Randy Stross whose Digital Domain column (unfortunately in Times Select) in the NYTimes is doing a bit on Wikipedia. I get to say something like, &#8221; Of course, my collegues use Wikipedia. They are lying if they don&#8217;t admit it.&#8221; I also say that I require students to go [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-news-of-news","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}