Paul Schatzkin is 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. He was born in New York City and raised in Springsteen Country (Monmouth County, NJ).A graduate of the Antioch College work/study program, his multi-faceted career has included everything from earning an Emmy Award nomination for video editing (in the 1970s), to taking tourists sailing and snorkeling in Hawaii (in the 1980s), and launching Nashville’s first Internet music business (in the 1990s). He has spent the first two-plus decades of twenty-first century researching and writing two biographies of obscure scientists from the twentieth.
His two books are: "The Boy Who Invented Television" about Philo T. Farnsworth and "The Man Who Mastered Gravity" about T. Townsend Brown.
All Philo T. Farnsworth did was invent 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 first book — "The Boy Who Invented Television" — traces the arc of Farnsworth’s life from the advent of television in the 1920s and 30s to edge of humanity’s next frontier: clean, safe, and abundant energy from controlled nuclear fusion.
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 under the direction of UFO field pioneer Major Donald E. Keyhoe
Taken together, Schatzkin’s two books suggest that if advanced civilizations are gallivanting around the galaxy, then their vessels are propelled by the two technologies that Farnsworth and Brown came close to — fusion energy and gravity control — that remain tantalizingly out of reach of even 21st century humans.
Schatzkin's website: www.incorrigiblearts.com
Our cohost will be Tim Swartz.
Recording Date (including After The Paracast):
Wednesday, April 10 at 2:00 Pacific (5:00 PM Eastern)
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Broadcast and Streaming Date:
April 21, 2024