Philo Farnsworth: The Inventor of Television, Right Here

Philo T. Farnsworth was born in Utah in nineteen oh six and conceived his idea for electronic television while plowing a field at age fourteen. By nineteen twenty-seven he had transmitted the first fully electronic television image in San Francisco. But it was here, at his Philadelphia laboratory on this site, that he conducted some of the first live local television broadcasts in the late nineteen thirties, operating under the experimental station call sign W Three X P F.

Farnsworth held hundreds of patents and spent years in legal battles with RCA, which tried to claim that Vladimir Zworykin had invented television first. The courts eventually vindicated Farnsworth. He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame, though he rarely received the popular recognition his achievement deserved. He died in nineteen seventy-one, having given the world its most transformative medium.