7 Things You Didn’t Know a Mormon Invented

1. Television

One can’t speak of the invention of the television without looking at its inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth. Philo was born in 1906 in Beaver, Utah. His family had followed Brigham Young to the Utah Valley, and Philo grew up on a ranch in Rigby, Idaho where his family moved after leaving Beaver.

Philo loved science and first had the idea for electric television when he was 14 years old. Though he did not have a college or high school education, he was greatly interested in electricity and shared an early sketch of his idea with a chemistry teacher in 1922. In 1927, at age 21, he introduced his electronic television, an image dissector camera tube lit with an arc light that transmitted the first image ever, a dollar sign.

One of America’s largest corporations at the time, RCA, offered to buy his patent for the equivalent of over $1 million today, but he refused. Despite being the man responsible for the invention, Farnsworth later told his son concerning television: “There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.” By the time of his death in 1971, Philo Farnsworth was credited with more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents.

2. Electric Guitar

Before Alvin McBurney, the guitar was not quite as exciting and innovative. He built the first electrical amplifier for the guitar when he was just 15 and got a patent for it several improvements later.

In 1927 Alvin changed his name to “Alvino Rey” (“Rey” means “King” in Spanish) to fit in with the popularity of Latin music at the time and in the late 1930s was recruited by the Gibson company to develop a prototype pickup as they developed the Electroharp pedal steel guitar. It picked up popularity and evolved into the current model of electric guitar.

Alvino was not born LDS but in fact converted when he married Mormon Luise King, one of the singing King Sisters he worked with in his time with Harold Heidt’s Musical Knights.

The rest of 7 Things You Didn’t Know a Mormon Invented can be found at LDS Living