- Televisión -

Extracto de un artículo muy interesante de cracked.com, titulado "6 Genios que vieron cómo sus inventos terminaron terriblemente mal"; me gustó mucho el artículo acerca del inventor de la Televisión, la idea que él tenía, y el horrible resultado final.
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#4.
Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971)

Invented:
The modern television.
Lived to See:
Gilligan's Island.

EUREKA!
Already born with a ridiculous name, Philo T. Farnsworth's life story doesn't make for the happiest of reading. It's a litany of financial troubles, corporate espionage, legal battles, bad timing, heavy drinking and nervous breakdowns. But the man was a genius; he was born in a log cabin and theorized the basic principles of electronic television while cultivating a potato field at the age of 14. Yep, that's right, 14-years-old, an age when most of us couldn't theorize the basic location of our ass using both hands.

A few years later, while wooing his future wife, Philo spoke to her about his dreams: "He talked a lot about what television would do," Elma Farnsworth remembered. "He saw that television would allow people to learn about each other. He felt that if you could learn how other people live, world problems would be settled around the conference table instead of bloody battlefields. He thought that everyone in the world could be educated through television, and that it could also be used for entertainment and sporting and news events."

CRAP!
And he was completely right! Well, except for the part about learning not to hate people who are different. He was pretty far off there. As for educating the masses, we can give him the benefit of the doubt if we use the widest possible definition of "educating."
But pretty much from the get-go, any idea of television being an enriching benefit to the human race were cast aside in favor of quiz shows, adorable chimps and dancing cigarette packs with great gams.

In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow made his famous speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, describing the horrors of television as a "vast wasteland." And this was decades before Flavor of Love.
Meanwhile, Philo T. Farnsworth observed all of this with an increasingly regretful eye. His son, Kent, described his father feeling that "he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives," and summarized his attitude as "There's nothing worthwhile on it, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your... intellectual diet." Had he lived, it's safe to say that Philo Farnsworth would have had the world's worst set of TiVo Suggestions.

He did soften a bit in his final years, saying that televised images of the moon landing "made it all worthwhile," but an accidental viewing ofHee Haw the next day led him to regret this brief moment of fulfillment.

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