He was the first inventor to transmit a television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. The image transmitted was a dollar sign. Farnsworth developed the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions. He filed for his first television patent in 1927 (pat#1,773,980.) Although he won an early patent for his image dissection tube, he lost later patent battles to RCA. Philo Farnsworth went on to invent over 165 different devices including equipment for converting an optical image into an electrical signal, amplifier, cathode-ray, vacuum tubes, electrical scanners, electron multipliers and photoelectric materials.

Imagine, instead of RCA it could have been “Philo”.

My great great grandad was pretty cool, and famous/notorious in SC.

Richard Baxter Hayes, was a grocer who got “red-hot” with the Holiness religion. He was instrumental in the growth of the Pentecostal church in the Carolinas and in his time was revered right up there with other evangelists such as Billy Sunday and Dwight Moody. His respect began to wane however, when he held noisy revivals complete with wild glossolalia, tambourine shaking,the whole charismatic enchilada. The family got kicked out of town a lot. Though a biblical conservative, RB was socially liberal and took a lot of criticism for his support of equality for black folks and women,(gasp!- this was in the South in 1900!) and he was dedicated to helping the poor. His greatest downfall came when his youngest child fell deathly ill and he refused medical treatment for the boy, relying instead on raucous prayer vigils from his followers. They didn’t work, the boy died, and my grt grt grandaddy was the the first man to be tried and convicted by the state for child neglect.

Though we’d have tangled over religious dogma and expression of faith, I think I’d have like him. He was charitable, charming, and darn funny.
His quote on full-immersion baptism:
“Well, it didn’t hold for me. I went in a dry sinner and I came out a wet one.”

Even though I have visited his Oklahoma residence (now a museum) several times, it wasn’t until I read his biography a few years ago (by Grant Foreman) that I realized just how amazing – and unsung – the life of Sequoyah was.

If you don’t read the rest of this post, the most amazing (and amazingly underrated) fact about Sequoyah is that he is the only known person to take a spoken language (Cherokee), and single-handedly create a sucessful, easy to use, written form for it.

Briefly (OK, not so much), here’s a guy in the early 1800’s who has an impaired leg, “uncertain” parentage, and belongs to a tribe (Cherokee) that is being spread out and spread thin by the U.S. government. Seeing whites use “talking leaves” fascinated him. So what’s a lame, displaced, b***ard to do? Even though the idea was shunned by seemingly everyone around him, Sequoyah decides to hole up in his house and create a written form of the Cherokee language so friends and relatives spread out all over the South could communicate. He created a syllabary, eventually won support of local tribal leaders, taught it to those around him, had them write letters to loved ones hundreds of miles away, HAND DELIVERED the letters to their recipients, taught them the syllabary, and went back home with a load replies to distribute. WOW!!!

He died while walking around part of Mexico looking for what he believed was a lost group of Cherokees, to share the gift of written language with them.

Within five years she had started her own manufacturing company selling hair care products and cosmetics. By 1917, she was a millionaire and found herself in charge of the largest business in the United States owned by an African American.

That’s 12 years from starting to sell hair tonic for someone else to self-made millionaire. That in itself is an achievement worth celebrating. But considering she was an African American woman at the turn of last century from an impoverished background, she’s incredible.

First, and also along the local trivia lines… J. Sterling Morton founder of Arbor Day. This guy is the reason there are trees in Nebraska, and was an early environmentalist, and he did it from my hometown.

Second, I’d say John Vincent Atanasoff. He was a interesting guy who developed and built the worlds first electronic digital computer. But he was so much more crazy than that. He also invented a language that could be read by both humans and machines, and actually tried teaching this to some kids. How handy would this language be when our robot overlords come to rule us?

Charley Harper passed away in June of this year at home in Cincinnati.