[QuadList] Happy Birthday, Philo! Electronic television's inventor got his idea while farming

[Ted Langdell]

Philo Farnsworth would have been 105 today. He died March 11. 1971.

Read more about the inventor of the first successful all-electronic  
television system using the Image Dissector photosensitive tube and a  
number of other cool things here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth

Mark Sept. 3, on your calendar as the first press demo of the system  
in 1927.

See Farnsworth stump the panel on I've Got a Secret, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKM4MNrB25o

Where'd he get the idea for electronic scanning?

According to this account, http://www.nndb.com/people/662/000024590/

(Born in Utah)..."He was raised on a farm, where at about 14 years of  
age he conceived of a way to transmit images electronically. As he  
later described it, he was tilling a potato field with a horse-drawn  
plow, crossing the same field time after time and leaving lines of  
turned dirt, when it occurred to him that electron beams could do the  
same thing with images, leaving a trail of data line-by-line. He first  
described and diagrammed television in 1921, in a science paper turned  
in to his 9th-grade science teacher, Justin Tolman, whom Farnsworth  
always credited as inspiring him to a life in science."

That paper was key to winning the patent lawsuits with RCA. The  
teacher had kept the paper and presented it in court in 1935... giving  
evidence to the value of archiving.  Wonder where that paper is now?

Ted Langdell
Secretary

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