One Summer: America, 1927

image necessary to make television a commercial proposition. In practical terms it was impossible to produce more than about sixty lines of imagery, and the viewing screen could never be larger than about the size of a drinks coaster. Nevertheless, Baird persevered and by the summer of 1927 had about as good a working model as his system could provide.
    On 8 September, slightly less than five months after the Bell Labs presentation with Herbert Hoover, the New York Times reported another exciting demonstration of television, this time from England. As reporters looked on, Baird used his mechanical system to send a live image of himself more than two hundred miles from Leeds to London. His image was clear, but it was also frustratingly small at just two and a half inches by three; and when magnified to a larger size through a special lens it lost all clarity.
    In fact, unknown to Baird, the New York Times and everyone else in the world at large, television had actually had its real birth one day earlier in far-off California when a young man with the resplendent name of Philo T. Farnsworth, the greatest inventor of whom most people have never heard, used cathode ray tubes and an electron beam to produce an image that genuinely had the promise to make television an enchanting reality.
    Philo Farnsworth, ‘the forgotten father of television’, was born in 1906 in a log cabin in Utah. His parents, pious Mormons, moved the family to a farm in Idaho not long afterwards, and it was there, in the idyllic surroundings of the Snake River Valley, that young Philo spent a happy childhood. He was uncommonly bright and devoured everything he could find on science and technology. In the summer of 1921, while ploughing his father’s field, the fifteen-year-old Philo had a scientific epiphany. He had been reading Einstein’s theory on electrons and the photoelectric effect, and now it occurred to him that beams of electrons could be scanned on to a screen in a back-and-forth pattern exactly as he was ploughing his father’s field, one line at a time in alternating directions. Within months he had devised a workable plan for transmitting images electronically. He made a sketch of it, which he showed to his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman. Luckily for Farnsworth, Tolman was so impressed that he kept the drawing. It would later confirm Farnsworth’s priority for the invention.
    Lacking financing, Farnsworth left the idea undeveloped and instead finished high school, married his sweetheart and enrolled at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City. One day he fell into achance conversation with two young businessmen from San Francisco, who were so impressed with his ideas that they offered to invest $6,000 – which is to say, their entire joint savings – in the project, and to help him secure a bank loan. With this, Farnsworth set up a small lab on Green Street in San Francisco. He was still just twenty years old – too young, as he discovered, to sign the contract on the bank loan.
    Farnsworth filed his first patents for television in January 1927. Building a working television system was an almost ridiculous challenge. Parts couldn’t be bought off the shelf – most of them didn’t exist, except in Farnsworth’s fertile brain – so nearly every glowing valve and gently thrumming tube had to be designed and built from scratch. Farnsworth and a small team he assembled worked feverishly, and by early September were ready to transmit the first image ever using electronic apparatus. The image was only a simple horizontal line and Farnsworth only sent it as far as the next room, so it didn’t have the romance and awe of Baird’s or AT&T’s creations. But it did have one thing the rival inventions didn’t have: a future.
    At the heart of Farnsworth’s system was something called an image-dissector camera, which allowed him to paint (as it were) pictures across a screen by scanning them in electronically one line at a time – and to do it so quickly that the eye is fooled into thinking it is seeing a series of continuous images. Even in its earliest versions Farnsworth’s system had 150 lines, giving it a crispness that no mechanical system could ever achieve.
    Although the wider world knew nothing of Farnsworth’s invention, people who understood electronics soon learned of it and came to marvel at his work. One visitor was the physicist Ernest Lawrence, who was overjoyed to behold a part of Farnsworth’s