My business card says:
Paul Schatzkin
Writer, Photographer, Musician – Artist…*
…and when you follow the asterisk to the bottom, there’s a note that says:
*…and I’m going to keep telling that lie until it comes true.
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I’ve written two books, and I’m working on a third.
The first was finished and published in 2002:
The Boy Who Invented Television
…is a biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, the 14-year-old Idaho farm boy who invented television in the 1920s. His is one of the great (mostly) untold stories of the 20th century, and worth the read, considering the fact that the screen you are looking at right this second can trace it’s origins back to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high-school science teacher in 1922.
For more on the unfolding of that saga, visit Farnovision.com. Search that site for “sorkin” (actually, I just did that for you) to see how “Hollywood” has handled the story.
But wait! That’s not all! Once he was done with television, Philo Farnsworth utilized a discovery he made in the 1930’s to develop a nuclear fusion process in the 1950s and 60s. You know, fusion: the clean, safe, and unlimited energy from the same nuclear process that powers the sun and stars? Skeptics keep saying “fusion is 20 years in the future and always will be” but I think it’s 50 years in the past and we missed it. And there are people all over the world who are experimenting with Farnsworth’s process in their own basements and garages. Since 1998, I have hosted a website that serves as a clearing house and knowledge base for all that experience at Fusor.net.
*
The second book was intended to follow on the themes struck in the first, but turned out to be an intractable quagmire and was published in 2009 as an unedited manuscript (eBook only) for the benefit of anybody daring (or dumb) enough to go down that rabbit hole. It’s called..
Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown
Good luck with that…
(There is also small follow up volume called Defying Sanity: A Brief Return to The Twisted Universe of T. Townsend Brown that re-examines the project and the circumstances that led to its abandonment That exercise remains unpublished at this time, lest its publication rouse the ire of a certain crazy bear.)
*
In 2016, I am working on the third book. This one is a memoir of sorts. This of course raises the question of “who wants to read a memoir of somebody they’ve never heard of? But hey, who’s even asking? The manuscript is based on the journals that I kept during my senior year in high school and first year of college (which really only lasted a month). It’s work in progress, but I’ve been posting new installments to Medium.com as they manifest and gathering them here:
Time Capsule: 1969
A 60-Something Looks Back at The 60’s
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