Some of the biggest ideas come from the humblest places. In the early 1920s, a teenage boy on a ranch in Idaho was doing ordinary farm chores. But his mind was on something extraordinary: how to send moving pictures through the air using electricity alone.
The boy was Philo Farnsworth, and he became the inventor credited with the first U.S. patent for television. He worked out the principle of his electronic camera tube, called the image dissector, in the summer of 1921, when he was just 14. His inspiration came from the back-and-forth motion of plowing a field. A picture, he reasoned, could be broken into lines and scanned row by row, then rebuilt on a screen.
A Farm Kid Who Loved Electricity
Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a small log cabin in Utah, the oldest of five children. In 1918 his family moved to a relative's ranch near Rigby, Idaho. To young Philo's delight, the house had electricity from a generator, and he quickly learned to repair it.
He tinkered constantly. He rewound a burned-out electric motor and used it to turn his mother's hand-cranked washing machine into an electric one. He found a stash of technology magazines in the attic and even won $25 in a magazine contest for inventing a magnetized car lock. His love of electronics took off after his first telephone conversation, with a distant relative.
The Sketch on the Blackboard
At Rigby High School, Farnsworth shared his television idea with his science teacher, Justin Tolman. He covered several blackboards with sketches and diagrams explaining how it could work electronically. Tolman encouraged him.
That moment turned out to matter enormously. Years later, the giant Radio Corporation of America challenged Farnsworth's patent. During the case, Tolman produced a sketch he had made of Farnsworth's blackboard drawing from 1922. Farnsworth won, and after a legal fight that lasted more than a decade, RCA finally agreed in 1939 to pay licensing fees.
A Straight Line and a Dollar Sign
On September 7, 1927, at his lab in San Francisco, Farnsworth's camera tube sent its first image to a receiver in another room. It was just a straight line. He reportedly told his stunned assistants, "There you are, electronic television!"
His financial backers wanted to know when they'd see money from the invention. So at a 1928 press demonstration, the first image he showed was, fittingly, a dollar sign. In 1929, he transmitted live images of people, including his wife, Pem, whose eyes were closed, possibly because of the bright lights required.
Farnsworth wasn't the only television pioneer. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had publicly demonstrated a working television in London in 1926, using a partly mechanical system. Farnsworth's breakthrough was making the whole system electronic, with no moving parts.
The Night It All Felt Worthwhile
Farnsworth went on to hold 300 patents, mostly in radio and television, and he later even built a small nuclear fusion device. But according to his wife, he had mixed feelings about what television had become.
That changed on July 20, 1969. Watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, live, Farnsworth turned to his wife and said, "Pem, this has made it all worthwhile." Not bad for an idea that a 14-year-old first dreamed up behind a plow on an Idaho farm.
