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19-21 a sharecrop in Rigby Idaho a
Mormon family the Farnsworth's have
recently moved in
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teenage son Philo is expected to follow
in his father's footsteps and become a
farmer but he has other ideas
philo farnsworth grows up at a time when
you have these great lone inventors who
are conquering the world at Thomas
Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and
they become his heroes it was filled
with nervous energy and he was always
tinkering and trying to invent things
and a chance discovery in the farm attic
is about to change his life
a collection of books and magazines
dedicated to scientific advancements
like radio the miracle of sound
transported through the air radio was
very popular then it was just a brand
new invention
finally we're sending sound through the
air but Philo's books also talk about
the next great challenge a new type of
radio that can beam pictures as well as
sounds many great inventors have tried
and failed but on this farm in Idaho
Philo is about to see a way of making it
happen he had a two horse team and the
disc carl's behind him and as he's
plowing he finishes and he looks behind
and that's when he sees that there's
lines across the field Philo sees
something in the lines of earth the
possibility of slicing an image in two
parallel rows and a point of light
scanning the rows line by line if it
moves fast enough it could make pictures
even moving pictures but how can you
manipulate the speed of light to create
a picture
in Britain a Scottish inventor thinks he
has the answer his name is John Logie
Baird his solution is a mechanical
spinning disc pierced with a series of
holes each lower than the next beams of
light passed through the holes and a
lens focuses them on a subject in a
darkened room the light reflecting from
the subject is received by photo cells
which translates it into electrical
current transmitted by radio waves a
radio receiver turns this wave back into
electrical current and feeds it to a
neon lamp a second disk spinning at
exactly the same speed then projects the
light reassembling the image Logie
Baird's mechanical TV was elegantly
simple it produced fairly crude picture
but it was a brilliant invention but it
wasn't practical to implement on a large
scale
the mechanical discs make the sets too
large and they move too slowly to create
a sharp image but Philo thinks he's
found a better solution in the pages of
his science journals electrons subatomic
particles so small they can move back
and forth tens of thousands of times per
second if he can find a way to control
them he realized and understood that
electrons would be fast enough to do it
one line at a time and that the human
eye would see it as one picture
he's desperate to tell someone about
this idea so one day he sketches it out
for his science teacher mr. Tollman
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it shows what Philo calls an image
dissector
light enters through a lens it's
converted into electrons which pass
through a vacuum and then are turned
into an electronic signal that can be
beamed out far and wide like a radio
signal but this signal recreates the
original image line by line it's the
world's first electronic TV camera
and his teacher was blown away he
couldn't believe that a
fourteen-year-old was able to conceive
these ideas and let alone understand
them
Tolman looked at it and said it just
might work
and that was really all the
encouragement he needed philo farnsworth
holds the key to one of the most
valuable inventions of the 20th century
and it's about to make him a target for
jealous rivals determined to steal his
ideas
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