BIOGRAPHY

Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth is an aged, eccentric, yet accomplished inventor, founder and owner of Planet Express and an honorary Globetrotter. He is crotchety, absent-minded and sometimes brilliant, most well-known for his work in 30th century robotics.
In 2999, he was the last known relative of Philip J. Fry. Later, Professor Farnsworth discovered that he had fathered a son, as well as the clone that he had kept hidden. In addition, he also serves as a tenured professor at Mars University teaching the Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields. Farnsworth is an inventor of both useful and impractical things, some of which are extremely dangerous, such as his Doomsday devices. Personality-wise, he varies from callous disregard to sentimental affection. He has no objection to sending his crew on missions which may eventually kill them, and has sent previous crews to their deaths before. (At times, he even seems eager to send crews on life-threatening missions.) Farnsworth is the oldest living member of the Academy of Inventors, where he often competes with his arch nemesis, Dr. Ogden Wernstrom.

INVENTIONS

Smell-O-scope

In the show’s first season episode “A Big Piece Of Garbage,” the Smell-O-scope was Professor Farnsworth’s seemingly useless space smelling invention. As he explained, “If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won’t be out of the loop.” It certainly came in handy when it detected a giant ball of garbage — a last-ditch effort by New York in the year 2020 to stave off overflowing landfills — that was hurling towards the Earth. The ensuing antics involved continuous spoofs on the 1998 film Armageddon. Turns out that in 2011, a small company actually invented a handheld Smell-O-Scope, although it dubbed it the Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometer. Killjoys.

Scooty-Puff, Jr.

When Fry was tasked with saving the universe from the Brainspawn in season four, he had to infiltrate their secret base, the Infosphere. Fry’s allies against the brains, the highly intelligent yet adorable Niblonians, gave him the Scooty-Puff, Jr. for the task. A wind-up contraption resembling a children’s toy, the Scooty-Puff, Jr. ended up falling apart when Fry tried to escape, leading him to request a more advanced vehicle — the larger, more impressive Scooty-Puff, Sr.

What-If Machine

The Wath-If Machine was a Professor Farnsworth device that could predict a scenario based on any “what if” question it was asked. After a series of events that pertain to each character on the crew and their respective “what if” questions, the Professor tosses the machine in the garbage, declaring it a failure due to the preposterous scenarios it generated. The whole episode turns on its head when everything is revealed to be one huge, layered simulation from the What-If Machine, generated when the Professor asks what if he had invented the Fing-Longer.

Fing-Longer

Invented by Professor Farnsworth in an alternative timeline — one he detected via the What-If Machine in the season two episode “Anthology of Interest I,” the Fing-Longer allowed the wearer to reach farther than normal — say, to press buttons. Not exactly groundbreaking, but who couldn’t love a name like the Fing-Longer? Not only does this device now actually exist as a Wii mote accessory, the idea of the Professor getting inspiration from himself provided an interesting philosophical conundrum. Can you be said to have invented something if the initial inspiration came from some external source, even if that external source is an alternate version of yourself? Yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.

Mind-Switcher

The season six episode “The Prisoner of Benda” introduced this invention of Professor Farnsworth and Amy, the Mind-Switcher. After a dizzying number of mind switches, the whole crew is in disarray with everyone in someone else’s body. This episode generated what was apparently the first mathematical theorem created for a television show. Futurama writer Ken Keeler, who holds a doctorate in mathematics, wrote the Futurama Theorem as both a real-world theorem and the solution used in the show that proves “that regardless of how many mind switches between two bodies have been made, they can still all be restored to their original bodies using only two extra people, provided these two people have not had any mind switches prior.”