the Damned Thing Works: Philo Farnsworth, David Sarnoff, and Eleven-Year War That Built Living Room

He did not come from a laboratory. He came from a potato field. In Idaho in 1921, a teenage farm boy named Philo Farnsworth looked at the parallel furrows behind his plow and saw a way to send moving pictures through the air. With no money, no institutional backing, and only Pem-his future wife-to believe in him without laughing, he began building the system that would become electronic television. Three thousand miles east, David Sarnoff was turning RCA into the most powerful electronics corporation in America. When he saw what the farm boy had invented, the fight for television's future-and credit-was on. THE DAMNED THING WORKS follows the eleven-year war between the young inventor and the mogul: the patents, laboratories, courtroom battle, and the woman who preserved the record when the industry tried to rewrite it. A narrative history of invention, ambition, and the fight over who gets remembered.