And so, as the 1930s began, Sarnoff and his allies were simultaneously trying to discredit the Farnsworth television and to reproduce it—such was the perverse genius of the Sarnoff plan. The talk campaign was similar to the one he’d lodged against FM and Edwin Armstrong: Farnsworth’s invention, while of some scientific interest, did not work, and so his patents were invalid. The key audience for this disinformation was, of course, the investment community, and in 1935 RCA intensified the effort to keep them away from Farnsworth by means of what we now call a “vaporware” strategy.
