April 21, 2024 — Paul Schatzkin with Tim Swartz

This episode features better audio and fewer ads: Gene and cohost Tim Swartz introduce Paul Schatzkin, a biographer of obscure 20th century scientists. He has been described variously as a visionary, gadfly, serial entrepreneur, Internet pioneer, staunch McLuhanist, author, occasional bomb-thrower, guitarist and songwriter. His two books are: “The Boy Who Invented Television” about Philo T. Farnsworth and “The Man Who Mastered Gravity” about T. Townsend Brown. As to Farnsworth, he invented a thing called “the television” — which over the course of his lifetime (1906-1971) became the most ubiquitous appliance in the history of human civilization. Every video screen on the planet — including the one you are looking at now – can trace its origins to a sketch that 14-year-old Philo drew for his high school science teacher in 1922. Schatzkin’s second book — exploring the mysterious life of T. Townsend Brown (1895-1985) — is “the biography of a man whose story cannot be told.” “The Man Who Mastered Gravity” is a tale that lives in the Venn diagram between science, science fiction and pseudo science, with elements of world history, international espionage, and cross-generational romance. He was also involved in the early creation of a UFO research organization, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which was later placed under the direction of UFO field pioneer and disclosure advocate Major Donald E. Keyhoe.

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