Philo Farnsworth(1906 — 1971)

In 1921, at just 14 years old, Philo Farnsworth was plowing a potato field in Idaho. Seeing the perfectly parallel rows traced by the plow, he had a flash of insight: an image could be broken down into lines, scanned one by one, then reassembled. This farm boy's intuition would become the very principle behind electronic television.

In 1922, the young Philo sketched his television idea on the blackboard for his chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, who kept the memory of that drawing. Twelve years later, when the giant RCA challenged his patent in court, Tolman reproduced the sketch from memory before the judge. This testimony helped Farnsworth win his case against an enormous company.

On September 7, 1927, in his San Francisco laboratory, Farnsworth transmitted the very first fully electronic image: a simple straight line. Tired of waiting for profitable results, one of his backers once asked when they would finally see some money: by way of reply, Philo transmitted the image of a dollar sign ($).

In 1957, Farnsworth appeared incognito under the name “Doctor X” on the television show I've Got a Secret. The panel had to guess his secret: “I invented electronic television.” None of them could. He left with 80 dollars and a carton of cigarettes — poignant proof that the inventor of television remained a complete unknown.

Toward the end of his life, Farnsworth took on an even greater challenge: producing energy through nuclear fusion, with a device called a “fusor.” In 1969, watching the first human steps on the Moon broadcast live, he confided to his wife Pem that this image, made possible by his own invention, had “made it all worthwhile.”