The Boy Genius and the Mogul
The Boy Genius and the Mogul tells the story of the invention of television. This is one of those inventions where you can't really point to one person. It's not like the lightbulb and Thomas Edison or the cotton gin and Eli Whitney. Television was something that a lot of people were working towards at the same time, a race to create this new technology that everyone expected and could tell was very near. It was also at the time when science shifted from lone men with a lot of money and leisure time inventing things on their own to massive, well-funded research divisions under the umbrella of technology companies. So there isn't really one person who can take credit for the invention of television. But there are a handful of key people, and one in particular whose ideas, at least, were a few years ahead of everyone else. The book focuses in on Phil Farnsworth (namesake for the professor in Futurama ), a young genius who worked tirelessly to get a television i...