100YearsOfTV

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To have the right idea is one thing;
To have the right idea and make it work is everything.

––Roger Penrose

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Television is unique in the annals of invention because of how many ideas that would not work were pursued before somebody finally came up with the right idea – and made it work.

By the 1920s, all the necessary pieces of the puzzle were on the board. 

Persistence of vision yielded dramatic (and comic) results in motion pictures. Radio waves carried not only telegraph signals but voice and music.  And it was clearly understood that before motion pictures could be hitched onto radio waves, the images would somehow have to be scanned into individual elements and converted into a fluctuating current of electricity. 

The Right Idea

In the first decade of the new century, proposals began to percolate around the idea of using Karl Braun’s cathode ray tube for the purpose of transmitting and receiving moving pictures by wire or radio.   

As early as 1907, Boris Rosing – a Russian physicist and professor at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology –  experimented with a cathode ray tube as a receiver for signals produced by a Nipkow-type mechanical scanner.  Though primitive, this work marked the first time an electronic display was used to reproduce a visual signal. ^⁠1

In 1908 Alan Archibald (A.A.) Campbell-Swinton – a Scottish-born electrical engineer, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a noted authority on X-ray and cathode ray technology – was the first to propose using a cathode ray tube for both ends of a television system in the British science journal Nature.

So the idea of using cathode ray tubes for television was already simmering in the firmament even while the most determined experimenters of the day were still spinning wheels to create television pictures. 

This recreation of a mechanical television system shows that this is about as good as it ever got.

By the mid 1920s, a whole slew of contraptions that reflected the physics of the late 19^th century were built by, among others: Ernst Alexanderson at General Electric, Herbert Ives at AT&T, and the independent experimenters John Logie Baird in Britain and C. Francis Jenkins in the U.S. 

What all these video jalopies had in common was their reliance on the spiral-perforated disk first proposed by Paul Nipkow in the 1880s.  

From Humble Beginnings…

Meanwhile, on the rural frontier of Idaho, the most unlikely of prospects was thinking he might be uniquely suited to the task at hand.  

Philo T. Farnsworth was the 14-year-old descendant of the Mormon pioneers who followed Brigham Young to the Salt Lake valley in the mid 19^th century.  His father earned his living from farming and from hauling freight over the mountains in horse-drawn wagons.  

The boy showed an early interest in science, but it was not until he was 11 years old that had his first personal encounter with electricity, when his family moved to a homestead near Rigby, Idaho.  From journals and magazines he found in a loft, he started to learn the state of the art in science and invention.  He learned about Edison and Tesla, Marconi and Bell, and before he was a teenager had confided in his father his hope that he had been “born an inventor.” 

Somewhere among those dusty pages he read about the still fanciful notion of “moving pictures that could fly through the air” – and television, he concluded, would be just thing with which to launch his career as an inventor. 

Once the objective was in mind, he taught himself everything he could about  cathode ray tubes, electrons, and how they could be manipulated by magnets.  And most of all he studied the theories of Albert Einstein – in particular, that very first 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. 

Which brings us to the thing that most distinguishes Farnsworth from his predecessors (or, in the long run, his competitors).  He was born in 1906 – the year after Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis – meaning that he grew up in a world that started with relativity and quantum mechanics. That fact of fate empowered him with a uniquely native 20^th century perspective from which to approach the riddle he sought to solve. 

And so legend (actually, fact) has it that one day before his 15^th birthday …

…While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, the summer of 1921 found Philo T. Farnsworth… strapped to a horse-drawn disc-harrow, cultivating a field row by row, turning the soil, and dreaming about television to relieve the monotony. 

…The Idea That Would Work

As the open summer sun blazed down on him, he stopped for a moment and turned around to survey the afternoon’s work. In one vivid moment, everything he had been thinking about and studying synthesized in a novel way, and a daring idea crystallized in this boy’s brain. As he surveyed the field he had plowed one row at a time, he suddenly imagined trapping light in an empty jar and transmitting it one line at a time on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons.^⁠2

Finally, somebody had the right idea.  

What remained to be seen was whether this untrained and self-educated teenager could make it work. 

Long story short: The idea for a fully electronic camera tube occurred to Philo T. Farnsworth in the summer of 1921. In the winter of 1922, he drew a sketch of that idea for his high school science teacher.  In 1926 – after four long years during which he expected to find his idea in the next science magazine he opened – some well-heeled bankers set him up with a grubstake and a loft in San Francisco.  In January 1927, he applied for a patent for his idea and went to work to build a fully electronic television system entirely from scratch. 

Farnsworth and his new wife Elma (Pem) Gardner were joined by her brother Cliff, who – with training experience barely the equal of Farnsworth’s – installed himself as the chief glassblower, fabricating the tubes that Farnsworth had first envisioned six years earlier. 

The evening of September 7, 1927 finds the tiny ‘lab gang’ ready to test the latest of several systems they had built over the prior months.  This time, a glass slide with a simple straight line painted on one side was dropped between a bank of bright lights and the camera tube, which Farnsworth had dubbed the “Image Dissector.” 

In the adjacent room, Farnsworth and Co. watched the face of the receiver as it flickered and bounced for a moment. When the system finally settled down, all present could see the straight-line image shimmering boldly in an eerie electronic hue on the bottom of Farnsworth’s magic tubes. 

Farnsworth called out, “Rotate the slide, Cliff.” 

When he did, everybody could see the image on the receiver rotate as well.  

For the first time in history, information was being transmitted from the bottom of one empty bottle to the bottom of another.  

The event was recorded in Farnsworth’s journal:

Or, as one of the investors who witnessed the occasion telegraphed to another, “the damn thing works!” 

The first successful electronic video image, recreated 50 years later

Defining The “Right” Idea

The century since that night in San Francisco in 1927 has  borne out Roger Penrose’s axiom:  Philo T. Farnsworth had the right idea and he made it work. 

Why did Farnsworth’s system constitute the breakthrough that had for so long eluded so many others? 

The answer to that question is revealed in one paragraph of the patent that he’d applied for earlier that year, which was granted as U.S. Patent #1,773,980 in August, 1930^⁠3. Claim 15 in that patent describes: 

An apparatus for television which comprises means for forming an electrical image, and means for scanning each elementary area of the electrical image, and means for producing a train of electrical energy in accordance with the intensity of the elementary area of the electrical image being scanned.

That is the legal language that announces the arrival of electronic video, and the secret is right there in the first clause: the “electrical image.”  

What the Image Dissector did was essentially the opposite of what all the mechanical system did before it.  

The mechanical systems shined bright lights on a subject, and after scanning the reflected light through their spinning wheels, converted the light into electricity. 

Working with a simple, pure, and elegant embodiment of Einstein’s photoelectric effect in a vacuum tube, Farnsworth’s Image Dissector created an electrical counterpart to the optical image and scanned that. 

In other words, the mechanical systems scanned the light. 

Farnsworth scanned the electrons. 

That was a breakthrough of epic proportions what humans could do with quantum forces and particles. 

And here we are, nearly a century later, conducting all most all of our business and communications from screens. 

¹ Among Boris Rosing’s students was another ambitious and aspiring engineer named Vladimir Zworykin.  We’ll get to him later.

² Excerpt from The Boy Who Invented Television by Paul Schatzkin

³ “Decisive” because RCA tried mightily through the 1930s to take possession of claim 15, but was thwarted in patent interference number 64,027 delivered in 1935 which bestowed “priority of invention” on Farnsworth.

[milestone_featured]

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On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re adding up all the pieces needed to get to that date.

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Before this meandering journey through the history of science and technology can reach its desired destination – the actual inventing of television – physics will have to quite literally make a quantum leap. 

Michael Faraday’s experiments with electrical induction in the 1830s, followed by James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, gave science its first comprehensive grasp of electromagnetism. That understanding spawned telegraphy, electric lighting, sound recording, motion pictures and wireless – the array of gadgets that made television imaginable.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the study of electricity had not only transformed daily life, it was also starting to alter our fundamental understanding of the universe that we live in.  

Each step along the path of that new understanding was built on prior discoveries.

Faraday and Maxwell

When Faraday showed that electricity could produce magnetism and vice-versa, he was building on the work of  Hans Christian Ørsted, who observed the  in the 1820s that an electric current could deflect a compass needle. That meant that electricity produced magnetism. 

Faraday engineered the inverse of Ørsted’s nugget, using magnets to  produce electricity – which laid the groundwork for practical electric generators and motors.

In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell distilled Faraday’s insights into a set of equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single electromagnetic theory.  

By determining that light was another kind of electromagnetic wave, Maxwell’s work was a triumph of classical physics, but it also opened the lid on an even deeper well of mysteries. 

The news that light is an electromagnetic wave opened the floodgates for the kinds of questions only scientists can ask:  If light is a wave, why do heated objects change color as they get hotter, instead of simply shining more brightly?  Why do heated gases give off only a few bright colors of light instead of a smooth rainbow of light?

It’s a Quantum Thing

In 1900, the German physicist Max Planck offered an answer to such questions that quickly opened the door on a whole new field of inquiry. Planck suggested that energy is conveyed in discrete “packets” that he called “quanta,” rather than in a smooth, continuous flow like a wave. With this hypothesis, Planck fixed the first cornerstone in a new field of physics called “quantum mechanics” – the study of matter and energy at the subatomic level. 

Meanwhile, another German physicist, Phillipp Lenard, was experimenting with Braun’s cathode ray tubes.  In 1902, Lenard performed detailed experiments on Hertz’s 1887 observation that electrons are released when light is shined on certain metal surfaces – the effect that enabled the photocells in the first mechanical attempts at television.  Lenard measured how the number and energy of electrons depended on the intensity of the light. He confirmed that higher-frequency light knocked out higher-energy electrons – but he couldn’t explain why.

For his discoveries with cathode rays, Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905. But that acclaim was lost in the clamor later that year when yet another German physicist published a paper that offered a solution to the questions that even Lenard still could not answer. 

His name was Albert Einstein. 

1905 – The Annus Mirabilis

The year that Lenard won his Nobel is better remembered as Einstein’s  “Annus Mirabilis” – the “miracle year” when he published not one, not two, but four different papers that rewrote physics for the 20^th century. 

A century later, Einstein is most remembered for the paper that introduced the elastic “spacetime continuum” of Special Relativity, and the most famous mathematical formula of all time, E=mc².  

But Einstein’s first 1905 paper set the stage for a revolution in physics when he articulated and quantified the “photoelectric effect” that was already being utilized in countless experiments without being fully understood.  

Einstein’s breakthrough explained that light behaves not only as a wave but also as a stream of particles, which — borrowing from Planck — he called ‘light quanta,’ later known as “photons.”^⁠1

Of course, Einstein’s hypothesis was greeted as heresy by the orthodox scientific community that continued to profess – per Maxwell – that light could only be an electromagnetic wave.  

An American physicist at the California Institute Of Technology (Caltech), Robert A. Millikan, even spent a full decade trying to disprove Einstein’s ‘light quanta’ hypothesis.  Millikan finally had to accept that the data confirmed Einstein’s radical idea and resolved the puzzles that Lenard and others had struggled to explain.  

In 1921 Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize – not for Relativity or E=mc², but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect^⁠2. 

Einstein’s Nobel was timely recognition.  With the addition of his clear articulation of the phenomenon by which light becomes electricity, all the essential pieces of the puzzle that had to be solved for television to go fully electronic were on the table. 

All that was needed was somebody who could put them together. 

And in the summer of 1921, that somebody was tilling a field near Rigby, Idaho.

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¹ In his first groundbreaking 1905 paper (entitled: On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light): Einstein referred to “energy quanta” and to light consisting of “independent energy quanta localized at points in space.”  

Gilbert N. Lewis introduced the word “photon” in a paper entitled  The Conservation of Photon published in the journal  Nature in 1926. He meant it as a convenient term for a unit of radiant energy, though the physics community quickly adopted it as the particle name for Einstein’s light quanta.

² It should be stressed that Einstein had not discovered the photoelectric effect. That distinction belongs to Hertz and Lenard.  Einstein’s Nobel-worthy contribution was quantifying  the law that governs it, which became the cornerstone of quantum mechanics.

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On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re adding up all the pieces needed to get to that date.
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Today’s installment covers two very different technologies needed to achieve real television.  The first is another step toward the electronic picture; the other redefines how those pictures will be sent and received.

Cathode Rays

In the annals of invention, some years stand out more for the ideas they set in motion than for practical gadgetry they actually delivered. In the annals of television invention, such a year was 1897.

First, in Strasbourg, the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun devised a new kind of glass tube that made the invisible visible. Taking the Crookes tube one step farther, Braun added a fluorescent screen and electrically charged metal plates that could bend the cathode rays. By January 1897 he had demonstrated an “oscillograph” in which the beam could trace patterns on the screen, a primitive ancestor of the oscilloscopes and television picture tubes to come. Braun’s device offered, for the first time, a controllable beam of electrons in a glass bulb.

Meanwhile, in Cambridge, Sir Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson – the Director of the University of  Cambridge University’s esteemed Cavendish Laboratory – was trying to find an explanation for the phenomenon that Braun, Crookes, and their predecessors observed in their tubes.  

In the spring of 1897 – just a few months after Braun demonstrated his first cathode ray tubes – Thomson stood before audiences in London and declared that those cathode rays were not caused by some mysterious fluid, as many still believed, but by streams of negatively charged particles. 

At first, Thomson called those particles “corpuscles” (Latin for “little bodies”), wanting to steer clear of another word that had been coined by the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney. In 1891, Stoney used the word “electron” to describe – in theory only – the fundamental unit of electric charge. Six years later, Thomson identified the actual subatomic particle that carried that charge.  

Within a few years, the scientific community began favoring Stoney’s term, and by 1904, “electron” was standard terminology in physics and industry. 

In 1906, Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases” – in simplified lay terms, for discovering the electron, a particle George Stoney had named in theory six years before Thomson’s discovery.

Look Ma, No Wires! – 1901

By the turn of the 20^th Century, science had found ways to send words, sounds, and even pictures over wires. 

But there can be no magic carpet of “pictures that fly through the air” unless you can get the pictures out of the wires.

The possibility of broadcasting was foretold in the 1860s, when Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a  unified theory.¹ 

Maxwell’s equations shaped not only the practical uses of electricity, but remain among the fundamentals of modern physics. And within Maxwell’s equations was the first suggestion that electromagnetic waves could ripple through space at the speed of light, circumventing the need for wires.

Maxwell’s equations remained theoretical until the 1880s, when the German physicist Heinrich Hertz conducted several practical experiments with Maxwell’s suggestions.

In his laboratory Karlsruhe, Hertz built an oscillator that generated high frequency sparks and a loop of wire that detected them across the room. The sparks on the detector leapt in time with those at the source, proving that Maxwell’s waves were a real, physical – if entirely invisible – phenomenon. When asked what use his discovery might have, Hertz shrugged: “Nothing, I guess.”^⁠2

But in Italy, Guglielmo Marconi thought otherwise. Where Maxwell had written only equations and Hertz had experimented only with sparks, Marconi saw the possibility of communication^⁠.3 

Working from his family’s estate in Bologna, Marconi’s first wireless set consisted of two components largely based on Hertz’s experiments from the 1880s. For a transmitter, he modified Hertz’s spark-gap generator to discharge high-voltage sparks. On the receiving end, he used a device called a “coherer” –  a glass tube filled with metal filings. When the filings were struck by the waves from the spark-gap generator, they clumped together enough to close an electrical circuit and ring a bell.  

That actually makes the first successful demonstration of “wireless” a crude form of remote control. 

But Marconi didn’t stop there. He tinkered endlessly with his aerials, stringing ever taller vertical wires. His big breakthrough came when he grounded those wires to the earth and discovered that Hertz’s sparks produced signals that could travel many miles.

The next step was to translate the experiment into a form of communication, which in those days meant adapting it to Morse code. 

In 1897, Marconi demonstrated his system to the British Post Office, sending dots and dashes across England’s Salisbury Plain.  Later that year he formed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, and over the next few years he extended the range of his system over ever wider distances.  

The Dawn of the Age of Wireless is most commonly dated to December 12, 1901, when Marconi claimed that he picked up the Morse code for the letter “S” (three dots) with a receiver in Newfoundland from a signal generated across the Atlantic in Cornwall, England. The feat was questioned by many at the time, but it captured the world’s imagination, made Marconi a household name, and provided the credibility he needed to grow his company on both sides of the Atlantic. 

There was still one more piece to add to the puzzle: actual sound.  

“Wireless” meant only Morse code until the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden began experimenting with the idea that radio waves might carry the full spectrum of sound. In December 1900, on a site in Maryland, he conducted what is often cited as the first transmission of human speech by wireless, using a crude microphone to modulate a high-frequency spark transmitter. The words were faint and distorted, but it proved that wireless could be more than scratchy bursts of dots and dashes.

Fessenden adapted his approach to continuous waves with transmitter he developed with Ernst Alexanderson, an engineer at General Electric.  On Christmas Eve 1906, transmitting from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, he played a phonograph recording of Handel, performed O Holy Night on his own violin, and read a passage from the Gospel of Luke. When ships along the Atlantic coast accustomed to hearing only dots and dashes suddenly heard music and a human voice, another epic threshold was crossed in the evolution of human communications. 

Fessenden’s experiments were primitive, and Morse code continued to be the primary form of wireless communication for another two decades. During that time, Marconi’s companies grew to dominate the business, and by the eve of World War I, he was operating a global network of stations, licensing equipment to navies, shipping lines, and news agencies.

When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, the Federal government thought better of having such critical assets owned by foreign interests, and commandeered American Marconi’s holdings for military use. 

Enter Goliath

After the armistice in 1918, the Navy and the government persuaded the General Electric Co. to form a new company to take over the Marconi patents, and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919.  GE kept a controlling stake, but Westinghouse, AT&T, and the United Fruit Company soon took large stakes in RCA – setting the stage for the monolithic, corporate capitalism that would dominate broadcasting – and the advent of television – in the decades that followed. 

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¹The term “broadcast” long predates radio and television. In English farming usage of the 18th and 19th centuries, to “broadcast” meant to sow seed by hand, scattering it widely across a field. The word was later adopted metaphorically for radio in the early 20th century, describing the wide dispersal of signals through the air.

² If “Hertz” sounds familiar, that is because despite his downplaying his discovery, his name was adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1933 to replace “cycles per second” and became part of the International System of Units  in 1960.  So when we speak of radio frequencies now, we speak  of “kilohertz” and “megahertz.”

³ Like nearly everything else in the annals of invention (and especially when it comes to television/video), controversy swirls around the origins of wireless/radio. While Marconi is generally credited with making radio practical, others were experimenting along parallel lines. Nikola Tesla conducted wireless transmission tests in the 1890s and later contested Marconi’s patents; Alexander Popov in Russia demonstrated early receivers around the same time; and Jagadish Chandra Bose in India explored short-wave experiments that anticipated later techniques. For the sake of clarity, we follow Marconi’s storyline, while acknowledging the broader cast of pioneers.

[milestone_featured]

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On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re lining up all the puzzle pieces needed to get to that date.
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Starting in the 1880s, all the research toward the ultimate dream of “moving pictures that could fly through the air” revolved – quite  literally – around the principles first articulated by Siemens and first demonstrated by Bidwell: that light could be converted into electricity and back again.

Spinning Wheels

Paul Gottlieb Nipkow was a 23-year-old student in Berlin, studying mathematics and physics in 1884 when he was awarded German patent number DE30105C for his “Elektrisches Teleskop” – the  “Electric Telescope.^⁠1”

Nipkow was hardly an established scientist or an inventor in the mold of Edison, Bell or Siemens.  He was an aspiring undergraduate, immersed in the heady atmosphere of the age when innovations like the telegraph, the telephone, and electric light transformed daily life.  

Legend has it that on Christmas Eve of 1883, Nipkow sat in his rented lodgings and puzzled over how he might send an image down a wire.^⁠2 The problem was simple to state but baffling to resolve. How could a complex visual scene be reduced to a current of electricity? His solution was to scan the subject sequentially, breaking it down into linear elements one line at a time.

To achieve that sequential scan, Nipkow devised a flat disk perforated with a spiral of small, evenly-spaced holes.  As the disk spun, each hole swept across a different strip of the image. Those scanned lines of reflected light would land on a light-sensitive photocell on the opposite side of the disk from the subject, creating a fluctuating electrical current.  

At the receiving end, a second disk, synchronized with the first, reversed the process, tracing modulated lines of light across a screen to replicate the original pattern.  

Crude though it was, Nipkow’s concept was the first to express the essential principle needed to make television possible: sequential scanning, line by line and frame by frame. 

Nipkow himself never built an “Electric Telescope” but his idea dominated research in the field and compelled those that followed in his footsteps to bark up the wrong tree for the next four decades.

The Nipkow disk. Did it “work?” Or just demonstrate what would not work?

Vacuums & Tubes: 1642 – 1879

To fathom the next generation of innovations that ultimately led to television, we must first return to antiquity and take on one of the vestiges of ancient wisdom. 

In his Physics (Book IV, 4–9), Aristotle declared that “nature abhors a vacuum.” For nearly two millennia after that, the doctrine of “horror vacui” relegated the concept of “empty space” to philosophy rather than science. That did not change in any meaningful way until the 17^th century. 

In the early 1600s, engineers in Renaissance Italy were perplexed when their suction pumps refused to draw water any higher than about 32 feet, no matter how strong the mechanism. If, as Aristotle had insisted, “nature abhors a vacuum,” then why did the pumps stop there?  They brought the quandary to the celebrated scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, who suggested that the limit might not be set by nature’s resistance to  emptiness, but by the weight of the surrounding air – an idea that went beyond Aristotle and hinted at a new physics of the atmosphere.

To test Galileo’s proposition, one of his contemporaries, Gasparo Berti, erected a 35-foot lead tube, sealed at one end, filled it completely with water, and then inverted it into a basin. The water fell away from the sealed top until it stabilized at roughly the same 32-foot limit the pump-makers had encountered.  That left a mysterious empty space above.  Could that empty space have been an actual vacuum, or was it filled with some previously unknown matter?  Berti’s experiment showed that air pressure seemed to set the limit, but it left unsettled the ancient debate over whether a genuine void could exist at all.

A year after Galileo’s death in 1642, his student and successor Evangelista Torricelli devised a more elegant test.  Instead of water, he used mercury, which is about 14 times denser than water, and required a tube only 3 feet high. When the mercury-filled glass tube was inverted into a dish, the mercury column fell until its weight was balanced by atmospheric pressure on the mercury in the dish. That still left an empty space of about 2 or 3 inches at the top which became known as the “Torricellian vacuum.”  This was the first reliable demonstration that – Aristotle notwithstanding – a sustained vacuum could in fact exist in a laboratory setting (if not in nature).

Torricelli also observed that the size of the empty space above the column of mercury varied between 2 and 3 inches, depending on the surrounding atmospheric pressure. With this discovery, Torricelli had effectively invented the barometer – arguably the first “vacuum tube” of any type, and the precursor of all the vacuum science that evolved through the centuries that followed.

Torricelli’s mercury column showed conclusively that a vacuum could exist.  In the 1650s, the German engineer Otto von Guericke took that discovery one step further by inventing  the vacuum pump – the first mechanical pump capable of pumping most of the air out of a vessel. 

In 1654, Guericke conducted a dramatic demonstration of his invention for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, using what became known as the Magdeburg Hemispheres. Guericke obtained two copper domes from his hometown, sealed them together, and then pumped all the air out of them with his vacuum pump. The resulting vacuum holding the hemispheres together proved so powerful that teams of horses could not pull them apart.  Only when air was readmitted did the spheres fall apart effortlessly, making a spectacle of the invisible power of the vacuum. 

Over the next two centuries, experimenters steadily refined the art of making and sustaining vacuums. Improvements in glassblowing and pump design allowed scientists to create ever higher vacuums and explore an array of electrical effects within.

In the 1850s, German glassblower Heinrich Geissler created delicate, airtight tubes filled with trace amounts of gas. When he ran an electrical current through the tubes, they produced striking patterns that varied in color according to the type of gas in the tubes. Scientists used these “Geissler tubes” to study electrical discharges in low-pressure gases. For the general public, the hugely popular novelties and their parlor tricks fueled the Victorian fascination with invisible forces: electricity, magnetism, and other “ethereal” phenomena.

A generation later, English physicist William Crookes pushed these devices into even higher vacuums. Crookes embedded two electrodes into his tubes: a negatively charged ‘cathode’ and a positively charged ‘anode.’^⁠3  When a high voltage was applied to the terminals, a visible electrical discharge seemed to stream away from the cathode across the vacuum toward the opposite end of the tube.^⁠4 This phenomenon became known as “cathode rays.” 

The real potential of the Crookes tube was demonstrated in 1879, when he mounted a small Maltese cross inside the tube; when the current flowed, the cross cast a sharp shadow on the glowing glass at the far end, suggesting not only that the cathode rays traveled in a straight line, but that they might be used to render images.

This is a good demonstration of a Crookes tube; starting at ~55 seconds, you can see the effect of a magnet on the cathode rays

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¹ Nipkow’s patent was actually granted on January 15 1885, but was retroactively dated back to January 6, 1884.  Apparently the patent could not be granted until Nipkow’s future wife paid the fee for him.

² 1884 is before anybody seriously considered sending electrical signals through the air.  The idea of radio waves began in 1886-1888, when Heinrich Hertz in Karlsruhe, Germany, built spark-gap transmitters and receivers that produced and detected radio waves across his lab bench.  Hertz was only trying to prove principles mathematically predicted earlier by James Clerk Maxwell.

In 1894 Guglielmo Marconi began experimenting in Italy with Hertz’s methods, with the express goal of sending useful signals. By 1895, he could transmit Morse code about a mile. This is usually considered the birth of practical radio.

³ The terms “cathode” and “anode” were coined in 1834 by Michael Faraday during his experiments on electrolysis. Drawing on Greek roots, he used anode (from anodos – “way up”) for the terminal where current enters a device, and cathode (from kathodos –  “way down”) for the terminal where current leaves. By Crookes’s time, these names had become standard in describing the positive and negative electrodes of discharge tubes, even though the true nature of electric charge and electron flow would not be fully understood until later.

⁴ Crookes tubes required several thousand volts to operate, typically in the range of 2–10 kilovolts (kV). At a few kilovolts, the tubes would produce glows and shadow effects; at the higher end – 10–15 kV – the beams became even stronger, producing fluorescence on the glass and the sharp “cathode ray” effects that fascinated Crookes and later experimenters.

[milestone_featured]

_________________________________________
_________________________________________

On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re lining up all the puzzle pieces needed to get to that date.
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During the decades when motion pictures emerged out of mechanics and chemistry, equally profound strides were made in the mastery of a fundamental force of nature: electricity. 

Given the indispensable role that electricity plays in modern life, it’s worth remembering: humans of some kind have roamed the Earth for hundreds of millennia, but have only mastered electromagnetism over the past two hundred years. 

We won’t go into the earliest discoveries by the likes of Franklin, Volta, Ørsted, or Faraday – who brought basic understanding to the threshold of mastery in the late 18^th an early 19^th centuries.^⁠1  We will start instead with first use of electricity for communication: the telegraph.  

Words on Wires

Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791, Samuel Morse didn’t start out to be a world-changing inventor.  

He studied art at Yale, and enjoyed a successful career painting portraits of such luminaries as the Marquis de Lafayette. He spent several years in Europe studying the Old Masters. During one such trip in the 1830s, he first heard how electrical impulses could travel along a wire.

On his return voyage from Europe in 1832, Morse sketched out an idea for using a single wire and an electromagnet to transmit coded signals. Back in the United States, he teamed up with the American inventor Alfred Vail, who refined the mechanics and the code, and with physicist Joseph Henry, who had already demonstrated how electromagnets could be used in relays. Together they turned Morse’s initial concept into a working system.

Morse conducted early experiments in the late 1830s, but the historic breakthrough came in 1844.  From a terminal in Washington, D.C he tapped out  “What hath God wrought” over an experimental line the government had strung to another terminal in Baltimore – proving that intelligence could be transmitted over wires. 

What God had wrought, the ensuing century would reveal, was global communication at the speed of light.

Sound on Wires – 1876

Samuel Morse had proven in 1844 that coded words could travel over wires. It took another three decades before the same could be said of words spoken by the human voice. 

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born educator who worked with the deaf.  He spent hours studying how vibrations of the larynx and inner ear could be translated into physical sensations that his deaf students could detect by touch or sight.  His lifelong fascination with the mechanics of sound convinced him it could be shaped and reproduced by instruments. That belief drew him to telegraphy, the dominant electrical medium of his time, and to the radical idea that speech itself might be carried over wires.

One of the technical challenges of the 1870s was finding a way to send several coded signals down the same wire without interference – an idea known as “harmonic” or multi-message telegraphy. Bell approached the problem as a student of acoustics, reasoning that if each signal were assigned its own musical pitch (what we now call ‘frequency’), the tones might coexist on a wire just as the human ear can distinguish multiple instruments or voices singing  in harmony. Pursuing that line of thought, he was soon captivated by a more daring proposition: if separate tones could travel together, why not the full range of the human voice?

Beginning in 1875, Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson built a series of crude transmitters and receivers – membranes stretched over magnets and coils – to convert the vibrations of speech into an electrical current. Most of these trials produced little more than garbled noise and static, but they kept building new experiments. 

That persistence paid off on March 10, 1876. Working out of a makeshift laboratory in Boston, Bell accidentally spilled battery acid on his clothes and called out, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” In the next room, an astonished Watson heard the words clearly – not through the wall but through the wires. For the first time in history, the human voice had traveled electrically from one place to another.

Bell’s success marked the leap from “words on wires” to “voices on wires.” There was still one more giant leap in electrical communications to come.^⁠2  

Pictures on Wires  – 1873 – 1876 

With the telegraph, mankind learned that information in the form of dots and dashes could be transmitted over wires. With the telephone, the same could be said for the human voice itself. But what about images?  Could light also be transformed into an electrical signal? 

That question got its first hint of an answer in 1840s. 

Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker and inventor, is often credited as the first to conceive a form of image transmission. Drawing from his expertise with electric clocks and telegraphy, he patented an “Electric Printing Telegraph” in 1843 and later proposed using synchronized pendulums and selenium cells to scan images line by line and transmit them over wires. Though entirely impractical with the materials of his time, Bain’s idea introduced the essential principle of breaking an image into sequential elements—a foundation for later developments in facsimile transmission and ultimately, video.

Meanwhile, in the decades after wires carried Morse’s question about God’s intentions, telegraphy became the nervous system of the world, with wires spanning continents and shrinking the time it took for news to travel between cities from days to minutes.  In 1850, the first telegraph cable was laid on the floor of the English Channel, connecting the United Kingdom to the Continent, and by 1858 the first transatlantic cable linked Europe and North America.^⁠3

Willoughby Smith, an English electrical engineer began his career at the Gutta Percha Company in London, where he worked on laying submarine telegraph cables.  In 1873, Smith made an surprising discovery while testing compounds for insulating the company’s cables. 

One of the materials he experimented with was the element selenium, a chemical cousin to sulfur, that was cheap, easily fabricated, and resistant to moisture.^⁠4 In the course of his tests, Smith noticed that the resistance of selenium was not constant.  It changed when the material was exposed to light. In darkness, it behaved like an insulator, but under illumination, its conductivity increased. Smith did not immediately grasp the broader implications, but this was the first clear observation that light could directly alter the flow of electricity in a solid substance. That observation implied possibilities that would take another half-century to fully manifest.  

Experiments with the relationship between light and electricity accelerated after Willoughby Smith’s seminal discovery.   

In 1876, the scene shifts to Germany, where Werner von Siemens presented a paper to the Berlin Academy of Sciences entitled On the Use of Selenium for Measuring Light Intensity and for Copying Images at a Distance.  In the first recorded dissertation on the subject, von Siemens not only validated Willoughby Smith’s, discovery, but proposed for the first time a practical way that images could be transmitted electrically. 

Siemens proposed using a selenium cell – slender rods or thin plates of selenium fitted with metallic contacts – to produce an electric current from light.^⁠5 

Siemens went from theory to application when he built the first working photocells that demonstrated the conversion of light into electricity. Though he never attempted to transmit an actual image of any sort, his proposal and subsequent experiments supplied an important milestone in the quest to turn light – and images – into an electrical current.  Such cells, Siemens fancied might one day act as “artificial eyes.” 

Siemens’ idea came to its first fruition in 1881, when London physicist Shelford Bidwell demonstrated what he called “telephotography” – the first practical use of selenium cells to send crude facsimile images over wires.^⁠6 Bidwell built a crude scanner that projected light through a moving slit onto a selenium cell; as the brightness varied, so did the cell’s resistance, producing a fluctuating electrical current that was recreated in a receiver. Bidwell certainly did not know it at the time, but he had introduced the essential principle that would govern television research until 1927. 

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¹ For the uninitiated: Benjamin Franklin (1752) showed that lightning is electrical in nature; Alessandro Volta (1800) built the first true battery, proving that electricity could be generated chemically; Hans Christian Ørsted (1820) discovered that electric current produces a magnetic field; and Michael Faraday (1831) discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind electric generators and transformers.

² Bell’s triumph was quickly contested by Elisha Gray, who applied a rival patent for a strikingly similar device on the very same day—February 14, 1876. Years of litigation followed, but Bell ultimately prevailed. Had the courts decided otherwise, the modern world might well speak of the “Gray Telephone Company” instead of Bell.

³ The first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in August 1858 but failed after only a few weeks. Reliable transatlantic communication was not achieved until a more durable cable was laid in July 1866.

⁴ Selenium is a gray, non-metallic element (atomic number 34) first discovered in 1817.

⁵ Werner von Siemens was already a major industrial figure in 1876.  Founded in Berlin 1847, his firm, Siemens & Halske, , grew into one of Germany’s largest electrical and industrial companies. So  when Siemens put his name behind selenium research, it gave legitimacy to what might otherwise have been seen as an obscure curiosity.

⁶ Two years later, in 1883. New York inventor Charles Fritts coated a thin layer of gold over a plate of selenium.  Fritts intent was not image transmission rather than power generation, but he proved that sunlight could produce current directly. His invention was the first solar cell – the first step in the modern science of photovoltaics.

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On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.

That date will mark the 100th Anniversary of the day that electronic video made its first appearance on Earth in Philo T. Farnsworth’s laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.

Before we can start the Countdown – and make the case that Philo T. Farnsworth invented television – we need to look back on the discoveries, speculations, false starts, and breakthroughs that finally came to fruition at 202 Green Street in San Francisco on September 7th, 1927.

As is so often the case, the path to the right idea was littered with curious detours. Some experiments genuinely added to our knowledge of light and electricity. And in hindsight, some seem almost comical, like those wobbly contraptions you see in old newsreels of men trying to fly before the Wright Brothers finally took off  at Kitty Hawk.

We’ll get to the TeeVee equivalents in due time…

By the time Farnsworth’s tubes hummed to life in 1927, he was building on a century’s worth of discovery and experimentation. His success was not a lucky accident. It was the culmination of decades of inquiry across a wide range of pursuits.

Still, his  contribution was the key that unlocked the future – the turning point between all that came before and everything that would follow.

The dream of “seeing at a distance” stretches back to antiquity. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wondered why a swinging torch appears not as a point of flame but as a continuous ring of fire. In that question lay the earliest recognition  that the human eye retains an image beyond the instant when it is imprinted. 

During Aristotle’s era, other dreamers imagined the the all-seeing Gods of Olympus, and wondered how men, too, might achieve such power. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke of visions from afar. In myths, mirrors, and crystal balls, the desire to witness distant events has been as enduring as the afterimage in the human eye that Aristotle first observed.  

So let’s start there. 

1824: Persistence of Vision 

Motion pictures and television would not exist if our eyes didn’t play tricks on us.  But it was not until the early 19^th century that science began to get a handle on the phenomenon that Aristotle had pondered two millennia earlier.  

On December 9, 1824, the British scientist Peter Mark Roget presented a paper to London’s Royal Society entitled An Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel When Seen Through Vertical Apertures.^⁠1 He showed how the spokes of a wheel, glimpsed through slits, seemed to curve because successive images remain briefly in the eye.  His conclusion – that each image lingers on the retina just long enough to create the illusion of motion – laid the theoretical foundation for both cinema and video. 

1832-1878:  Optical Illusions

Roget’s dissertation opened the door to a parade of optical toys and mechanical marvels. 

In 1832, the Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau turned still images into a kind of animation, in a contraption that he called the “Phenakistoscope” (from the Greek for “deceptive viewer”).  Plateau’s invention used a spinning disc with slits around the edge and sequential drawings on the surface that – when held before a mirror –  became the first device to employ persistence of vision to create the visual illusion of motion.²

The following year, the Austrian physicist Simon von Stampfer introduced a similar device he called the “Stroboscopische Scheiben” — literally German for “stroboscopic discs.”^⁠3 Unlike Plateau’s version, Stampfer emphasized the stroboscopic principle – the periodic interruption of light that tricks the eye into seeing movement.

In 1834, the British mathematician William George Horner introduced the Zoetrope^⁠4, a cylindrical drum with a sequence of drawings placed around the inner surface and a series of vertical slits cut into the sides of the drum. When the drum was spun, the viewer looked through the slits and the drawings came to life – a galloping horse, a dancing figure, a flying bird. The Zoetrope’s spinning drum-and-slits introduced an intermittent “shutter” effect: imprinting an image in the eye, then going dark until the next image appeared – intruding the principle that made motion pictures possible in later decades.^⁠5

Here’s an excellent video demonstrating the Zoetrope.

These parlor toys delighted Victorian audiences, but it took the addition of another new art form to reveal their ultimate promise.

Flying Horses

Photography first entered the picture (pun intended) on June 19, 1878.  That’s when California governor and railroad magnate Leland Stanford commissioned English photographer Eadweard  Muybridge to settle a wager over the question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves leave the soil momentarily when at a full gallop^⁠6. 

To resolve the debate, Muybridge arranged two dozen cameras in the ring at Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. The cameras were triggered by tripwires when Stanford’s prize mare ‘Sallie Gardner’ hit the wires with her thundering hooves. When the film was processed, it revealed that the horse did, indeed, come momentarily completely airborne.

Leland Stanford’s flying mare ‘Sallie Gardner’ in what is widely regarded as the first motion picture, ca. 1878.

Stanford won his wager, and Muybridge’s images of the flying mare were the first time motion was recorded in discrete frames and reassembled into perceived motion.

Muybridge’s work was built on that of Plateau, Stampfer, and Horner, and his work inspired cinema pioneers like Thomas Edison in the U.S. and Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, and the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in France.

The frame-by-frame manipulation of persistence of vision is the vital idea within all frame-based visual media. And it all derives from the phenomenon that Aristotle first observed in a swirling torch. 

1888–1894:  Celluloid Dreams

By the 1880s, Victorian parlor tricks like the Zoetrope evolved into the far more ambitious spectacle of cinema.

Some trace the beginnings of motion pictures to the French artist and inventor Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince.  On October 14, 1888, while visiting Leeds, England, Le Prince exposed several seconds of his in-laws walking through garden their onto a chemically treated paper strip.  Film historians cite those few seconds of “film” as the earliest surviving motion picture. 

Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene is first moving picture ever made using film and a camera.

 In 1891, the famous American inventor Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, which allowed one-person-at-a-time to view a tiny “movie” through a peephole. 

And in France, the brothers Lumière –  Auguste and Louis – perfected the cinématographe – a camera and projector whose name gave us the word “cinema.” In 1895 the Lumières began public screenings in Paris, launching the age of projected film.

Edison’s Kinetoscope

At their core, these inventions were the 19th century extension of Aristotles original observation:  that a rapid succession of still images could fool the eye into perceiving motion.

In the 1890s, celluloid replaced paper. Shutters and sprockets became more reliable, and films that once flickered for mere seconds ran long enough to tell stories. 

In 1894 another American, Charles Francis Jenkins, invented an improved motion picture projector he called the Phantoscope, which he sold to Edison, who rebranded it as the Vitascope. Jenkins made several other contributions to film tech, but by the turn of the century began to entertain an even bolder idea, something he would eventually come to call “radiovision”  – an early stab at broadcasting moving images.

Moe Rocca takes us through the career of C. Francis Jenkins

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^⁠1 If the name “Roget” sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’re old enough to remember Roget’s Thesaurus.  That was how we found words in ancient times –  before you just clicked and all the options popped up in a little window. 

^⁠2 Unfortunately for Joseph Plateau, his relentless pursuit of optical phenomena made him blind from staring into the sun.

³ In English, “Stroboscopische Scheiben” was quickly shortened to Stroboscope, the term still used today for devices that freeze motion with flashing lights.

⁴ Horner originally called his invention the  “Daedaleum” – after the mythic craftsman Daedalus. The name Zoetrope was adopted in the 1860s, when America toy makers reintroduced it to a wider audience.

⁵ And if the word “Zoetrope” seems vaguely familiar, that might be because renowned American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola named his production company “American Zoetrope.”

⁶ And if the name “Stanford” sounds familiar, that’s because Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, founded Stanford University in 1885, naming it after their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid at age 15.

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Starting in October, 2025 and for 100 weeks until September 2027, we’re going to highlight the “Top 100 Moments in the First 100 Years of Television.” 

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Why 100 Years, you may ask? Let me tell you a story….

Sometime in the summer of 1921, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth had an idea for an electronic television system. 

On September 7, 1927, he made that idea work. 

That makes September 7, 1927 the day that video arrived on this planet. 

From this website, we are counting down to the Centennial of what deserves to be recognized as a pivotal moment in human evolution. 

It Started With A Sketch

Here in the 21^st century, we stare at screens all day, never suspecting that every screen on the planet can trace its origins to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922. 

What Farnsworth drew – first on a chalkboard, then on paper – illustrated his concept for one of the most challenging concepts of the era: a vacuum tube that could convert moving pictures into an electrical current and send it through the air. 

The same year that Farnsworth got his idea, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the first of the four groundbreaking papers that he had published in 1905.  Einstein’s articulation of the Photoelectric Effect established one of the cornerstones of the quantum mechanics and the physics that led to nuclear energy in the middle of the 20^th century.

The sketch that Farnsworth drew for his science teacher was a pure application of Einstein’s theories bottled in a vacuum tube – and an epic breakthrough in what humans could do with the fundamental forces of nature.  

Farnsworth’s concept for an “Image Dissector” tube was the turning point in the ages old dream of “seeing from a distance,” and the one moment that made possible all the video technology we take entirely for granted today.

The Backstory

Some will argue that television – or, more broadly video –  did not spring fully born from any single discovery. There is some measure of truth to the assertion. 

There were earlier attempts to merge radio and cinema, to reconstitute a moving image into a steam of electrons that could be sent by air or wire to a distant destination.  But the earliest attempts – going back to the late 19^th century – quite literally married the mechanics of motion pictures to the chemistry of electronics.  It was clear from the outset that such contraptions would never produce the resolution necessary to transmit a coherent image. 

And there were, starting in the first decade of the 20^th century, suggestions that vacuum tubes could one day replace the mechanics.  In 1897, the German scientist Karl Braun introduced the Cathode Ray Tube – demonstrating that a beam of electrons could illuminate a phosphorescent surface in a vacuum tube. That a similar device might be adapted for the purposes of television was first proposed by the English scientist A.A. Campbell Swinton in 1908. During roughly the same period the Russian Boris Rosing actually tried to build such a system. 

But Braun’s cathode ray tube only solved one part of the equation: it could turn a beam of electrons into light.  

The hard part was always going to be finding the means to convert light into electricty.  That’s what Farnsworth figured out in 1921 and delivered in 1927. 

And here we are nearly 100 years later, reading these words on a screen. 

A screen that arguably would not exist were it not for the idea that Farnsworth sketched out in 1922 and delivered on his workbench in 1927. 

The Countdown to 2027

This website (and likely a book and hopefully a documentary to follow) will trace the evolution of video technology and its impact on civilization over the past century.    

Because of the way that television was drawn into the culture and the economy, much of that history has been swept aside – especially the compelling story of television’s earliest beginnings in the 1920s and 30s.  

Over the 100 weeks beginning October 5, 2025 and ending the week of September 7, 1927, we’re going to countdown in chronological order 

The Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Video.  

Every week over the next two years we will trace:

• The evolution of the technology that first appeared in Farnsworth’s San Francisco laboratory in 1927;
• The titanic struggles in the 1930s that finally delivered television to the world after World War II;
• The merger of video with digital computing in the 1950s;
• The changes in delivery technology from vacuum tubes and broadcasting to cable, streaming, WiFi and cell phones;

…and we will introduce you to the  countless colorful personalities who made their mark on the medium in the century since 1927. 

Join The Crusade!

Television / video is a global phenomenon, but this will be an admittedly very America-centric accounting of the medium’s history. There will be occasional nods to breakthroughs in other countries like Britain, Germany and Japan, bit the underlying reality is: Television was invented in America by an American.  

It will also be very “Farno-centric.” At its heart this project is intended to remind people who Philo T. Farnsworth was, and to restore to our collective memory the extraordinary, once-in-century individual who – as the poet Max Crosley put it – “breathed life into all our living room dreams.” 

So sign up for the email notifications or just come back when the moment suits you.  

You’re going to learn a lot of neat stuff over the next couple for years, and hopefully, at the end, there will be a world-wide celebration of the medium and the man who invented it. 

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