Connection: Romantic Individualism and Transcendentalism

In the article "The Televisionary", Malcolm Gladwell introduces this character known and Farnsworth to us, who is supposed to be the inventor and visionary of the television. Through out the article, it is mentioned in various ways that Farnsworth is a romantic. However, the way that this piece is written about Farnsworth, it is made out to imply that basically romantic individuals are bad because they are selfish and want things simply for themselves. They prefer to work alone instead of working in a group and getting the advantage of creating something even more magnificent. Even though this term is portrayed in a negative light in this article, there are some instances that suggest that the collaboration of individuals in general make great things happen.
This article relates in some ways to the idea of Transcendentalists. The founder of Transcendentalism, Ralph W. Emerson suggested that the greatest thing that a person could be is their own unique individual. For Emerson, the power and potential that the individual had was the greatest thing that ever existed. The ultimate goal of these Transcendentalists was for the individuals in one nation to act as their own person and make decisions that they know they want and now what the government or anyone else tells them to make. This idea of the rugged individual obviously played and still plays a very important role in our nation today.
Both Fransworth and Emerson were great examples of romantic individuals in our history in very similar ways. They both did things that interested themselves and ultimatley, they both wanted to make themselves important and the best they could be. The only difference is that Farnsworth was a visionary who was trying to be an individual in a competitive field where there was no room for individuals, but where there was only room for groups. This is a crucial idea because Emerson suggests that in order for someone to become a romantic individual, they would have to be in solitary confinement basically. However, since Farnsworth was working with a piece of technology that many other people were involved with, there was no chance for him to achieve the individualism that would lead him to claim success for the invention of the television.
The connection between these two very important people is very interesting in the sense that it demonstrates a perfect example of when an person can actually become his/her own individual and when he/she cannot. Also , the comparison between these two people show the change in society and technology as time went by and how these two things affected people all over the nation. In Emerson's time there were corporations, but not corporations that were as innovated and group orientated as the corporations in Farnsworth's time. This shows how much harder it was for Farnsworth to actually achieve individuality since he was constantly being pulled in by the mass.