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Her face was one of the first images transmitted on an all-electronic television, invented by her husband, Philo T. Farnsworth, after years of experiments to send pictures through the air.
Memorial services are pending for Elma "Pem" Farnsworth, who died Thursday at the Avalon Care Center in Bountiful. She was 98.
She worked as a lab assistant for her husband in the 1920s when he assembled the world's first electronic television system and took notes of his experiments. She spent the last 35 years of her life fighting for recognition of her late TV-pioneer husband.
Pem Farnsworth turned over her husband's papers to the University of Utah, which holds the premier collection of Philo Farnsworth, a forgotten inventor recently recognized by Time magazine as the Father of Television.
"She spent many years preserving the legacy of her husband, Philo, and delighting in his many scientific accomplishments, including the breakthroughs that led to the invention of television," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
She was also behind efforts honoring her husband on a postage stamp and was honored herself during the 2003 Emmy broadcast of the first Philo T. Farnsworth Award for excellence in technical achievement.
"Phil always said he never made an invention," she had said. "He was the conduit in which these things were given to the people."
She had told the story of her husband's epiphany many, many times.
Philo Farnsworth was a 14-year-old Idaho farm boy, plowing his father's potato field when the furrowed rows gave him the vision that pictures could be transmitted electronically - line by line, row by row. He was 21 when he transmitted the first television image in 1927: a single rotating line from an "image dissector" camera to a cathode ray tube for viewing in another room.
"There you are - electronic television," were his now famous words.
The first images of human beings were those of Pem Farnsworth and her brother Cliff Gardner. Both had comprised the team in the early, makeshift laboratory at the foot of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, wrote Donald G. Godfrey in Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television.
The triumph turned into an 11-year court fight with RCA executives who insisted that their top scientist, Vladimir Zworykin, had invented television and sued Farnsworth for patent infringement. Farnsworth won, but he was was left exhausted and in poor health. By 1940, he turned his attention to developing the first electron microscope, missile-guidance systems and hot fusion research.
"She knew her husband's work was valuable and her book about him, Distant Vision, is essentially a love story," said U. communication professor Tim Larson.
She was born near Vernal on Feb. 25, 1908. The two met through a friend while she was attending Provo High School.
He was enrolled at Brigham Young University, doing odd jobs before he was forced to drop out to support himself and his widowed mother.
He proposed in 1926 on Pem's 18th birthday, and they were married three months later.
Survivors include sons Russell of New York and Kent of Fort Wayne, Ind., said Julie Anderson, daughter of Pem Farnsworth's only surviving sibling, Lois Gardner Anderson, 88.
Elma Farnsworth
1908-2006