it gets it out 4 times a year, and it has the biggest circulation of any truly scientific magazine in the world, it has a circulation at the present time between 9,000 and 10,000 copies of an issue. We disseminate this knowledge; everything that is done is passed on to see whether it ought to come within the purview of the Patent Office, and if it ought to it goes before the Patent Office. Patents may or may not issue on it. Every other thing is published. And we do it, why? Partly for the prestige, yes; partly to satisfy the normal human desires of the men who are in the laboratories, but more because we profit more in the development of the telephone business for the people of the United States by having the base of knowledge increased than we do by trying to keep the stuff secret. We are perfectly willing to publish it for the sake of what we get in return.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Dr. Jewett. We enjoyed your testimony this afternoon.

Before we adjourn, may I ask you, Mr. Dienner, to announce what witnesses you have called tomorrow and what their subjects will be. Mr. DIENNER. Mr. Chairman, I assume we will sit tomorrow afternoon?

The CHAIRMAN. In the morning.

Mr. DIENNER. Only in the morning?

The CHAIRMAN. We will sit in the morning and afternoon unless there is some development that I don't know anything about now.

Mr. DIENNER. I should like to call tomorrow, Mr. Farnsworth. He will lay before us the case of a young man who with all the difficulties in the world before him was able to come forward with a brandnew idea. He will furnish the fundamental theory of the modern television which he conceived when he was 14 years old, and his difficulties, the difficulties of securing patents, and the interferences and difficulties which he encountered in the application stage.

Then I should like to call Mr. Lawrence Langner, who will give us a comparison between the laws of the United States relating to patents and the laws of foreign countries. I think that should be very interesting, as giving us some idea of what certain provisions in the foreign laws are intended for as compared with corresponding provisions or lack of provisions in the United States laws.

Then I should like to call, following Mr. Langner, Mr. Carlton. Mr. Carlton represents a group of manufacturers of parts of automobiles known as parts manufacturers. His testimony will go to the peculiar situation surrounding the manufacture and supply of automobile parts to the manufacturers of automobiles, and the rather restrained use of patents in that situation.

Then I should like to call one more witness on the general field, Mr. Baekeland, George E. Baekeland, of the Bakelite Co., who has a very interesting story to tell of how an industry was started first as a secret process and then abandoned because of its limitation and turned to the patent system as a proper basis for an industry which could grow.

The CHAIRMAN. You won't be able to cover all of those tomorrow? Mr. DIENNER. I shall not be able to cover them all tomorrow. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will stand in recess until tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock.

(Whereupon, at 4:25 p. m., a recess was taken until Thursday, January 19, 1939, at 10 a. m.)

INVESTIGATION OF CONCENTRATION OF ECONOMIC POWER

THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 1939

UNITED STATES SENATE,

TEMPORARY NATIONAL ECONOMIC COMMITTEE,

Washington, D. C.

The Temporary National Economic Committee met pursuant to adjournment yesterday, at 10:30 a. m. in the Caucus room of the Senate Office Building, Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney presiding.

Present: Senator O'Mahoney (chairman), Representative Williams, Messrs. Henderson, Ferguson, Patterson, Peoples and Coe.

Present also: Senator Homer T. Bone of Washington, chairman of the Senate Patents Committee. Counsel: John A. Dienner, special counsel for committee; George Ramsey, of New York, assistant to Mr. Dienner; Justin W. Macklin, First Assistant Commissioner of Patents; Henry Van Arsdale, Assistant Commissioner of Patents; Grattan Kerans, Administrative Assistant to the Commissioner of Patents.

The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please come to order. Mr. Dienner, are you ready to proceed?

Mr. DIENNER. Yes, Senator; I would like to call as the next witness Mr. Philo Farnsworth. Mr. Farnsworth, will you please be sworn?

The CHAIRMAN. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give in this proceeding shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Mr. FARNSWORTH. I do.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

TESTIMONY OF PHILO T. FARNSWORTH, VICE PRESIDENT FARNSWORTH TELEVISION, INC., PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Mr. DIENNER. Mr. Farnsworth, will you please tell us about your background and history?

Mr. FARNSWORTH. My introduction to television and to the field of invention happened so far back that it is difficult for me to remember just when. My first technical training came from having charge of a farm lighting system and the electric motors and so forth that were necessary to keep in repair, and that was at the age of 12. I was finally given the responsibility for this rather modest amount of electrical equipment because no one else could keep it running.

This is only significant in that it gave me a background at a very early age of the elements of electricity and gave me an incentive to study electrical physics and, through the medium of popular magazines a knowledge that there was such a thing as television.

The CHAIRMAN. Let's chalk one down for the popular magazines.

BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF FARNSWORTH TELEVISION IDEA

Mr. FARNSWORTH. It also gave me a theme for research which has continued throughout the years as a guiding light, or as a direction for research and development, namely the elimination of all moving parts from television equipment. That idea I had fairly well established in 1921, when I was 13 years old, so that the moment I discovered tools, out of textbooks I mean, which would enable television to be done without moving parts, the invention seemed almost simultaneous, as a matter of fact simultaneously with the discovery that there was an electron and a photoelectric effect.

In 1922 when I was a freshman in high school I made the first invention, my first big invention in television, and it consisted of a means for producing an electric counterpart of an optical image. At that time it was a daydream, a daydream only. I had no facilities for doing research, I had no money to buy equipment, all I had was access to a very modest school library, but my sum total of equipment which I had for forming any definite practical idea as to the problems in television consisted of a static generator of a physics laboratory and an old Braun tube.

Nevertheless, this daydream, as you might term it, had the basis for perhaps the most important invention and certainly the earliest invention in the electronic field, namely, that of a tube for electrically transmitting a picture without employing any moving parts.

In the 2 years following 1922, that is 1923 and 1924, I continued to do research in libraries and with any type of electrical equipment that I had to work with, with the idea of evolving a complete television system free from all mechanical inertia.

My family at that time moved from Idaho, where I was attending high school, to the town of Provo, Utah, where I had slightly more laboratory equipment at my disposal and continued to develop the previous notion of television without moving parts, so that in 1924 I had evolved what is essentially the present system of electronic television. Again I had no money and no suitable laboratory facilities to reduce this theory to practice. As a matter of fact it has taken. 15 to 17 years to make that a practical reality, but I didn't know how long it was going to take then, very fortunately.

In 1926 I was in Salt Lake City looking for anything I could do either to continue my schooling-my father had died and left the responsibility of the family to my mother and myself, and I was hunting for work, when I met two California businessmen to whom I disclosed my hopes and dreams of this television idea, who agreed to put up a sum of $8,000 to see if it was worth anything. I decided that was the proper time to get married, being 19 and quite old, so I got married and moved to Los Angeles, where we set up a laboratory, such as it was, to explore at least as well as we could with $8,000, the possibility of this television idea.

After just about 2 months, 2%1⁄2 months, as a matter of fact, of intensive work, we had used up all of the $8,000 and we had taken the idea to the California Institute of Technology and to experts wherever we could find some who would listen, and I convinced these early backers of mine, one of whom is Mr. Everson, who is here with me today, that at least the idea had some merit, but we had the basis for a nice patent, perhaps, but no substantial experimental evidence yet.

Mr. Everson's step then was to interest-and it sounds quite easy further financial backing in San Francisco, which he did very effectively and a group of San Francisco businessmen decided that it might be worth while to take a flyer on this television idea. As one of the men put it, it was a darned crazy idea but somebody ought to put some money in it. So they did agree to put up $12,000 more to see a little more what it was worth.

At that time, which was in October of 1926, we established the Crocker Research Laboratories in San Francisco for the purpose of continuing research on this idea which was essentially to take all moving parts out of television. Twelve thousand dollars sounds like it should be enough to find out what the idea was worth, but after 18 months we had spent 60 thousand, and without listing the problems in detail, I think it can be understood that it is very much as though someone with a considerable amount of knowledge-or it doesn't matter really to what extent the knowledge runs-is suddenly cast on a desert island, removed from all tools, and given the job of building a steam engine. That means building the tools to build the tools to build the tools to build the steam engine, and our problem of making a laboratory was, in the early part of our work, by far the greatest problem. Also, the state of the photoelectric art and of electric optics at that time was not far enough advanced to carry out properly the basic conception of the electron image scanning, as we have called it.

In 1926 and 1927 the photoelectric materials that we had were almost scientific playthings. The photoelectric material available were the haloid of alkali metals, particularly sodium and potassium, and the construction of photoelectric cells required an amount of knowledge and art and technique far beyond that available to me, and so I proceeded to get all the help from scientific institutions I could. I pestered the people of the University of California and Stanford and California Tech and anybody who would give me information or sell information. But to make a long story short, in the latter part of 1927 we demonstrated a television transmission which used apparatus that did not employ a single moving part.

The CHAIRMAN. You said that you pestered everybody who would give you information or sell you information. How much information did you have to buy?

Mr. FARNSWORTH. Most of it.

The CHAIRMAN. How did you buy it?

Mr. FARNSWORTH. Through the funds made available to me through this group of bankers.

The CHAIRMAN. And what type of information was sold?

Mr. FARNSWORTH. The technique of forming electron surfaces, the experience necessary to blow glass and evacuate tubes and sensitize photoelectric surfaces in vacuum, and purification of the alkali metals, the electrical circuits necessary for amplification, and so much similar material that it practically covers the entire field of physics and optics.

The CHAIRMAN. Were you actually buying the information or the preparation of the information, the service of conveying it to you? Mr. FARNSWORTH. The services of the scientists or technicians who gave it.

The CHAIRMAN. In other words, it was information already available.