The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It was on this day in 1927 that the first successful television image was demonstrated, by the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth. Farnsworth was a Mormon farm boy from Utah, and he grew up in a log cabin. When the family moved to a house in Idaho, Farnsworth was amazed that the house had electricity — he had never seen it before.

Farnsworth was a star science student. At the age of 13, he won a national competition for inventing a thief-proof lock. He was particularly fascinated by something called television. The basic premise of television existed, but the only technology used rotating discs, and it was basically a failure. Farnsworth was convinced that there was a better way. One day, when he was 14, he was plowing the family potato field with a team of horses. He looked back at his parallel lines of soil and was struck with an inspiration: What if he could scan an image in a similar way, with parallel lines of electrons, and reproduce it electronically? He approached his high school chemistry teacher with a set of complex drawings, his blueprint for electronic television. The teacher encouraged Farnsworth to pursue his idea, and filed away his student’s drawings.

Farnsworth finished high school in a couple of years, then started college at Brigham Young University. But after his father died, he dropped out to support his family. He couldn’t shake his television idea, so a few years later, the 19-year-old inventor approached two California businessmen and convinced them to lend him money to build a model. He moved to California, submitted a patent in January of 1927, and began building that summer.

On this day in 1927, he transmitted the first electronic television image: a straight line. When the line appeared on a separate receiver, his assistants just stared at it, speechless. Finally, Farnsworth announced: “There you are — electronic television!”

He continued to refine his technology. But he was not the only inventor who had been working on electronic television, and the powerful RCA (Radio Corp of America) tried to claim that its own chief engineer, a Russian-born scientist with a Ph.D., had invented it. The patent battle lasted many years, and the key piece of evidence to determine who had invented the television first turned out to be the teenage Farnsworth’s old sketches, which had been kept all that time by his high school chemistry teacher. The court sided with Farnsworth, but even though he had legally won, RCA’s publicity totally overshadowed his, and he never made much money on his patents. He was actually ambivalent about television, which he thought was generally a waste of time.

Farnsworth died of pneumonia in 1971. His final years had been marred by alcohol abuse and debt, and he died virtually unknown. The average television set sold that same year included about 100 items that had been first patented by Farnsworth.

Today is the 70th birthday of American political columnist Joe Klein (books by this author), born in Queens, New York (1946). He was a respected political reporter when he decided to write a novel based on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Although it was fiction, the characters were very thinly disguised. Clinton became Jack Stanton, and Hillary became Susan. Klein called the novel Primary Colors (1996), but he published it under the name “Anonymous.” Finally, when the Washington Post published a forensic handwriting analysis that linked Klein to the manuscript, Klein — wearing Groucho Marx glasses — held a press conference and admitted that he had written the novel and then lied about it. His fellow journalists were furious, but Primary Colors was a best-seller and made Klein a multimillionaire. He published a sequel of sorts, called The Running Mate, in 2000; in 2002, he published The Natural: Bill Clinton’s Misunderstood Presidency.

Klein has naturally weighed in on this year’s presidential race; this spring, he said of Donald Trump: “He has a feral intelligence. He reminds me of the Emperor Caligula who got his greatest pleasure from destroying his opponents and humiliating them, and he is brilliant at that.” He told Joe Scarborough: “I think that we have a citizenship deficit in this country where people don’t look at the issues. They do not study them at all and I think that [...] the American people are more comfortable with reality TV than with reality.”

It’s the birthday of writer Jennifer Egan (books by this author), born in Chicago (1962) and raised in San Francisco. She’s the author of several novels, including Look at Me (2001), The Keep (2006), and A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

She moved to San Francisco when she was seven, and in high school she worked at a candy shop on Haight Street named “Kiss My Sweet.” After college on the East Coast and postgraduate study at Cambridge, she settled in New York City, where she’s been firmly rooted for decades. Egan once explained that Emily Dickinson poetry is good reading for a person living in New York City. She said: “Certain books are easier to fit into New York life. I find it very hard to read Henry James here. There’s something about the multiple clauses, the almost archaeological quality of his observations, that requires really full attention.”

She writes using a pen and paper, the old-fashioned way — and all this despite the fact she was born not that long ago, in the 1960s. She said she started writing fiction before she had a computer, and after she got a computer in college, she tried for a while to write fiction on the computer. But she said: “There came a point when I realized my fiction written on a computer was inferior to what I was writing by hand — the choices I made on a screen were always wrong, and I would have to fix them by hand. It wasn’t a timesaving measure but a time-wasting measure because it required another step.”

In addition to writing fiction, Egan writes some long-format journalism, and since 1996 has written about a dozen articles for the New York Times Magazine, most of which have appeared as the Sunday magazine’s cover story.

Her next novel, Manhattan Beach (2016), will be published next year.

It’s the birthday of American musician Buddy Holly, born in Lubbock, Texas (1936), during the Great Depression. He was born Charles Hardin Holley, but Buddy was his nickname from early childhood. His whole family was musical and his brothers became quite popular at local talent shows. Once, he was so desperate to join in that they gave him a violin, even though he didn’t know how to play the violin. His brothers greased the strings so they made no sound when he moved the bow. He was happy, and the Holley brothers won the contest.

When he was 10, his parents bought him a guitar from pawnshop and his older brother Travis taught him to play. From then on, music was all he thought about. He spent hours listening to country and western songs on the radio, singers like Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and the Carter Family. His favorite show was the Big D Jamboree out of Dallas, Texas.

Holly graduated from high school (1955) and decided to pursue a career in music, but his tastes were leaning more toward a new type of music called rock and roll, music that had vigor and soul. A lot of parents were against it, but not Holly’s. They even penned a letter to the local newspaper defending rock and roll.

Holly formed a band with some high school classmates. They had some local success and even opened for Elvis once (1955). A Nashville scout saw the band playing as the local opening act for Bill Haley and His Comets at a skating rink and landed them a record contract with Decca. Holly’s name was missing an “e” in the contract, and that’s how he became Buddy Holly.

It was in Clovis, New Mexico, in February of 1957, that Buddy Holly and his band recorded the song “That’ll Be the Day,” releasing it under the name “The Crickets.” The song became a smash hit, selling over a million copies, and even influenced a new band called the Quarrymen in Britain. They later became The Beatles and sang “That’ll Be The Day” as their very first demo recording. The song title was inspired by the film The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne keeps repeating the phrase “that’ll be the day.” To date, the song has been covered by over 100 musicians, including Linda Ronstadt, Skeeter Davis, Foghat, and indie band Modest Mouse.

Buddy Holly and The Crickets went on to record several other hit songs, like “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy,” and “Every Day.” They appeared on American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Arthur Murray Party. When Holly met the Everly Brothers, they encouraged him to exchange his old-fashioned glasses for black horn-rims. The glasses became so popular with teens they became known as “Buddy Holly glasses.” Even a 13-year-old boy named Reginald Kenneth Dwight was so enamored of Buddy Holly that he started wearing black horn-rim glasses, even though his vision was perfect. They made him nearsighted. He grew up to be a musician, too, changing his name to Elton John. The Everly Brothers also got the band out of their business suits and into more classic suits called Ivy League. The narrow ties they wore were called slim jims.

In 1959, Buddy Holly and The Crickets went on a three-week, 24-city tour called the Winter Dance Party. The tour bus broke down twice and Holly’s drummer even got frostbite. Holly chartered a private plane and took along Ritchie Valens, who made the song “La Bamba” famous, and The Big Bopper, whose big hit was “Chantilly Lace.” Just after takeoff, the plane crashed into a cornfield outside Mason City, Iowa, killing everyone on board.

Buddy Holly was 22 years old. Ritchie Valens was 17, and the Big Bopper, whose name was really J.P. Richardson, was 29. They didn’t find Holly’s signature glasses until the spring, when the snow melted. They were promptly taken to the county courthouse, along with the Big Bopper’s watch, a lighter, and two pairs of dice. They weren’t discovered again until 1980. Holly’s black horn-rim glasses are now on display at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas.

When Buddy Holly was asked in an interview if rock and roll would last, he answered, “Oh, possibly. Yeah.”