Electronic television

Electronic television emerged on September 7, 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory when a 21-year-old inventor transmitted a single straight line to a receiver in an adjacent room. Philo Farnsworth had conceived the key insight six years earlier, at age 14, while plowing a potato field in Idaho. Watching the parallel furrows stretch to the horizon, he realized that images could be transmitted line by line, just as fields were plowed row by row.

The adjacent possible for electronic television had been forming since the 1880s, when researchers first proposed converting images to electrical signals. But mechanical systems using spinning disks with holes (Nipkow disks) produced dim, flickering images. The breakthrough required camera tubes that could convert light directly to electrons without moving parts—and vacuum tube technology had finally matured enough to make this possible.

Farnsworth's 'image dissector' used a photosensitive surface to convert light into electrons, then scanned the electron pattern line by line. The system worked, but it had a fatal flaw: without electron storage between scans, it needed extremely bright lights to produce usable images. Subjects had to endure arc lights hot enough to cause burns.

The convergent evolution of television is striking. Vladimir Zworykin at RCA developed the iconoscope, which stored charge between scans and worked in normal lighting. After visiting Farnsworth's lab in 1930, Zworykin returned to RCA and had duplicates of Farnsworth's tubes constructed. The resulting patent battle lasted years, with a 1935 ruling declaring Farnsworth the 'undisputed inventor of television.' RCA finally agreed to pay royalties in 1939—the first time the company had ever licensed outside technology.

The path dependence established in this era still shapes modern displays. The scanning system Farnsworth pioneered—breaking images into horizontal lines refreshed many times per second—became the standard for analog television worldwide. Even as technology shifted from cathode ray tubes to LED and OLED panels, the fundamental insight from that Idaho potato field persists: images can be decomposed into lines and reconstructed at a distance.