In 1864 an act of Congress created a hall for statuary in the U.S. Capitol. Each state was invited to send statues of two of its most famous citizens. Many states came up with both marble portraits right away.
Utah didn't get around to sending a likeness of Brigham Young until 1950. He alone has represented the state for nearly 49 years.However, on May 2, 1990, Philo Farnsworth will join Brigham Young. Farnsworth, known as the father of television, will take his place among the nation's statesmen, war heroes, artists and industrialists.
Utah artist James Avanti is sculpting a larger-than-life statue of the lanky inventor. Eventually he will display copies of the statue in Utah - one in the State Capitol and perhaps one at Brigham Young University, where Farnsworth studied.
Historian Leonard Arrington is writing an essay about Farnsworth to be read next spring in Washington, D.C., at the dedication ceremonies. Arrington says, "Philo Farnsworth was certainly one of the greatest inventors of all time. A genius, no question about it. He was a person who developed a major invention almost single-handedly."
And, Arrington adds, Utah has every right to claim the hero.
Farnsworth was born in Beaver on Aug. 19, 1906. He spent his teenage years in Idaho (Rigby now bills itself as the "Home of Television") and also lived in Maine, San Francisco (where he actually broadcast the first TV picture in 1927), Philadelphia and Indiana. However, Arring-ton says, Farnsworth spent most of his life in Utah. He died in Salt Lake City on March 11, 1971.
That Farnsworth was inventive was apparent from his early childhood. Fascinated by electricity, radio, telephones and phonographs, he drew a picture of a television tube for his high school science teacher when he was only 16.
The teacher remembered the drawing of a "dissector" tube later when he was called to testify in patent hearings between RCA and Farnsworth. His teacher's testimony helped resolve the patent dispute: Utahn Philo Farnsworth got credit for inventing television.
Arrington reminds us that Farns-worth made other important inventions. He worked on the gastroscope (an instrument to examine the human digestive tract), an incubator for infants, electron microscopes, infrared lights, radar and cathode ray tubes. "He had major patents and is almost always given credit in encyclopedias for inventing the cathode ray tube," says Arrington.
Farnsworth was working on nuclear fusion when he died.
His statue was a long time coming for two reasons:
First, he was not widely recognized as the inventor of television. Despite the fact that the U.S. Patent Office decided in Farnsworth's favor in 1930, an RCA scientist, Dr. Vladimir Zworykina, was often cited as the father of television.
Second, there was no concerted effort to commission another Utah statue for the nation's Capitol.
After his death, Farnsworth's wife, Elma, and son Philo Farns-worth III, set about making sure the shy inventor got the recognition he deserved. They asked the city of San Francisco to make a historic site of the laboratory at 202 Green Street where Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television image to another building about a mile away. City officials put up a plaque, but deemed the building itself to have no historic significance.
Gradually, his recognition grew. Mrs. Farnsworth wrote a book about her husband to set the record straight. He was inducted into Utah's Beehive Hall of Fame in 1982, a first-class U.S. stamp bore went on sale in 1983, and he was named posthumously to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984.
As 1989 - the 50th anniversary of the display of television at the New York World's Fair - approached, the public became more interested in the early history of the medium.
Meanwhile in 1984, Deseret News reporter Lee Davidson, noting that Utah was one of only six states that didn't have two statues in Statuary Hall, polled our readers about what famous person should be honored there. Students at Ridgecrest Elementary School conducted a similar poll. Philo Farnsworth topped both surveys, and the Ridgecrest students helped spark interest amaong Utah lawmakers.
In 1987, the Legislature selected Philo T. Farnsworth as the second Utahn suitable to stand in the nation's Capitol; but the lawmakers didn't fund the building of the statue.
So a commission was formed to try to raise the $250,000 members estimate it will take to create and cast the statue and pull off a fancy dedication ceremony in Washington.
According to Rick Sorenson of the Philo T. Farnsworth Statue Hall Commission, schoolchildren raised $17,000 of the $100,000 collected so far. Corporations have made large donations - for which they will receive one of 100 smaller versions of the Farnsworth statue being cast.
"We still have the lion's share of the fund raising left to do," Sorenson says. "Another job of the commission is to educate the people of Utah. By the time Philo actually goes to Washington, we are hoping Utahns will know who he is."
Sorenson has strolled through Statuary Hall in Washington. He says he looked with pride on the statues of some of the country's greatest thinkers. Pennsylvania, for example, displays William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, and Virginia has Thomas Jefferson.
Yet almost all of the statues are of people born before 1900, he says. "Without question, Farnsworth will be one of the most modern heroes in the hall." Come next May, Utah can demonstrate for the nation that our American tradition of enterprise and invention has carried through to this century.