Philo Taylor Farnsworth, the inventor of the first fully electronic television, lived in a rented house at 2910 Derby Street in Berkeley with his wife Elma (known as Pem) and her brother Cliff Gardner for nearly a year beginning in September 1926. Six days a week, the twenty-year-old Philo and Cliff boarded a Key Route E-line train at the Claremont Hotel station, transferred to a San Francisco-bound ferry, and then made the short walk to their laboratory at 202 Green Street. The commute took about an hour and cost 20 cents. At the lab, Philo concentrated on converting light to electrons. Cliff, after instruction from Cal’s glass-blowing lab, produced the vacuum tubes needed for transmitting visual images. Pem soon joined the enterprise as ‘”all-around handywoman,” she later wrote.

Two LA businessmen—George Emerson and Leslie Gorrell—had heard about Philo’s long-held dream from his Utah school days to electronically transmit moving images—“television”—so met with Philo and decided to invest in the project. But they wanted the research conducted in California, so Philo and Pem, who had married in early 1926, shortly headed west. Cliff soon joined them. More funding was found, and Crocker National Bank offered the lab space. But Pem wasn’t sure she wanted to live in San Francisco, so the trio looked in the East Bay. On the first day, Pem spotted a “For Rent” sign at the Derby house. The owner needed to leave town to care for a sick sister in LA, and rented it to them on the spot, fully furnished, for $62.50 per month. Philo and Pem drove her to the station that night.

Living in the shadow of Cal made Philo nostalgic for the college life he had left after one year at Brigham Young University. He loved spending Sundays wandering the Berkeley campus. One evening, Philo, Pem, and Cliff strolled over to the Greek Theatre, where Philo hopped onto the stage and recited from memory several passages from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that he’d memorized in high school.

After a year filled with long days, lab accidents and failures, as well as financial difficulties, in September 1927 Philo and Cliff finally transmitted the still image of a penciled line from an electron camera to a receiver behind a curtain. Soon, they transmitted an image of a moving object—cigarette smoke. The Age of Television had begun. Philo patented the equipment and made successive improvements. But RCA developed a similar television system about a year later. A ten-year patent struggle ensued that Philo ultimately won, but he lost out to RCA and others in the battle to profitably market his invention.

Sources:

Elma Farnsworth, Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier (PemberlyKent 1990).

Evan Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (Perennial 2002).