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Connections&
November 17th, 2002- 33rd Sunday of the Year
The parables of the talents:
"'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter... ?'
For to every one who has, more will be given, and they will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what they have will be taken away."
Matthew 25: 14-30
TELEVISION-ARY
Seventy-five years ago, a 21-year old genius named Philo T. Farnsworth devised a system for transmitting through the air a series of thin lines--lines that could form pictures.
As a 14-year old high school student in Rigby, Idaho, young Philo, the son of a potato farmer, theorized that images could be reproduced by shooting a beam of electrons against a light sensitive screen. He sketched a diagram for the system that astonished his high school science teacher. After six years of research and experimenting, the breakthrough came. September 7, 1927, the young genius managed to transmit across the length of his laboratory a single white line onto a screen. Philo T. Farnsworth had invented television.
Since that breakthrough in his San Francisco lab, many other engineers, technicians and scientists have developed new and highly sophisticated technologies that have made television the cultural force it is today. In fact, in the wake of the past 75 years of such stunning advances in communications technology, Farnsworth's contribution has largely been forgotten. But on this the 75th anniversary of television, historians are rediscovering Farnsworth's role and restoring his place in television history as the first to figure out how to scan, transmit and receive moving pictures electronically.
Farnsworth, who died in 1971, was idealistic about how television should be used. He thought it was a great gift to humanity that should not be abused. He decried that the medium had fallen into the hands of advertisers. But on that historic July day in 1969 when the technology he created made it possible to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, Farnsworth turned to his wife and said, "This has made it all worthwhile."
[The Boston Globe, September 7, 2002]
CONNECTION: It took the many talents of many visionaries and scientists to develop television--from the first sketches of a teenager in Idaho to the schematics of the billion-dollar communications satellite systems that bring us pictures from worlds light years from our own. And television has shown us what the misuse and squandering of such talents can do to degrade and debase the medium. Greatness in the eyes of God is not defined by the talents and resources we possess but by what we are able to accomplish with what we are given. Every one of us possesses some measure of talent, ability or skill--"talents" that have been entrusted to us by the "Master." Jesus teaches in today's Gospel that our place in the reign of God will depend on our stewardship of talents.¦
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