Ideas
In 1920, 14 year old Philo Farnsworth was plowing a potato field in Idaho. The teenager had moved there a couple years earlier with his family to a relatives farm. This farm was different though. This farm had electricity.
In 1920 electricity was only in 50% of homes and this farm boy picked it up quickly. He found old electronics magazines in the attic and started tinkering with anything he could find. Electronics came naturally to him and soon enough he was thinking of new things to build.
One day while plowing the potato field he realized that the straight lines back and forth through the field could be viewed from far away to look like a single image. Each line holding a horizontal fraction of the total image.
He connected this idea with electrons and pictures. Just like how he could slowly plow an image into a field maybe he could transmit an image one line at a time and recreate it somewhere else.
Nearly 10 years later, he held a patient for the first non-mechanical television using a horizontal image scanning technique and was well on his way to revolutionizing media and houses around the world.
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