Who Invented TV? More Detail for the Debate

Britain's EMI was indeed a pioneer in electronic TV, but Philo T. Farnsworth invented the technology ("Television's history -- or myth?" Readers Report, July 21 re "Summer reading, heavy to light," Books, June 30). Farnsworth's first demonstration of TV scanning, transmission, and reception happened on Sept. 7, 1927, as detailed in his lab notebooks. The U.S. patents on this system were issued to Farnsworth in 1930. As detailed in my book, The Last Lone Inventor, RCA later based aspects of its TV system on Farnsworth's designs.

As a corporation, Britain's EMI didn't come into existence until 1931. That year, EMI licensed TV technology from RCA. Isaac Schoenberg's team at EMI first began experiments with electronic scanning in 1932. Your reader is correct that the BBC's first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts in 1937 beat RCA's NBC network by more than two years.