In 1928 one John Logie Baird got a human eyeball to use as part of his experimental television scanner. Apparently it worked when the eye was fresh, but failed by the second day. First thought: City of Lost Children. Second thought: why assume that the eye needed to be human?
Most of this is a morality tale about the end of private invention, and the invention of television propaganda. Philo T. Farnsworth, the actual¹ inventor of television, was hobbled at every turn by RCA and its self-aggrandizing director Sarnoff. Sarnoff told many tales about his importance that weren't true, but had the broadcasting stations when the dust settled, after which it was his tales that were heard. Sarnoff managed this with FUD and lawsuits and RCA money; RCA stock made heaps of money for private investors in the 1920s, after RCA was created by government fiat and IP-arrogation in wartime. RCA, like other big companies at the time, was developing the process of work-for-hire invention.
That is to say, the invention of television shares its themes with plenty of other battles for control of ideas, from Disney vs. Eldred to open-source vs. Microsoft to Carlyle vs. Marx.
Farnsworth learned invention mostly from Hugo Gernsback magazines and from the machinery on an Idaho farm, and was backed in various ways by plenty of the people he met, who were soon convinced that he might indeed be really on to something. (Machinery that a kid can fix is a great accelerator of technology. I worry about injection-molded parts driven by screen-printed circuitboards: they don't take minor tinkering well. When the molders and printers are common, bliss will it be to be alive.) His life should have been a boring had-an-idea-built-it-throve story, like Mauve; but RCA thwarted it.
The saddest thing wasn't even that Farnsworth got so little of the money despite being so far in advance of other inventors. The saddest thing was that he believed television would lead to truth and mutual understanding, and then to peace: but the first public broadcast he ever saw was Sarnoff's PR coup claiming television for RCA.
¹See comment for another inventor. Either way, RCA is out.
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). , Technology.Farnsworth is not the sole inventor of television. Change your information please as it's incorrect.
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/2001/eng/hungary/tihanyi/intro.html
I don't have the book any more, or I'd check the index for mention of Tihanyi. Thanks for the pointer.