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You can get to the most recent Countdown posts in the sidebar to the right
(or at the bottom if you’re on a mobile device)
Or start from the very first post on September 7, 2025.
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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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Almost 100 years ago, a young man named Philo T. Farnsworth had the right idea and made it work.
In the summer of 1921, while the great minds of science wrestled with 19th century solutions to a 20th century problem, 14-year-old Farnsworth was plowing a field in Idaho when he dreamed of trapping light in an empty jar and transmitting it one-line-at-a-time on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons.
Every video screen on the planet – including the one you are looking at now – can trace its origins to a sketch that 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher the following spring:
The idea embodied in this sketch was demonstrated for the first time on a workbench in San Francisco on September 7, 1927. That achievement was recreated for the 50th anniversary in 1977:
(click view the entire CBS News coverage of that event).
Now another 50 years has past, and the technology that arrived on Earth that night in 1927 has transformed the world in ways that were previously unimaginable.
With our giant flat panel displays and handheld computers, from Netflix to TikTok, screens are ubiquitous. We take video entirely for granted today – unaware of what a breakthrough it was in its time.
It was not until Philo Farnsworth applied the theories of Albert Einstein** to the challenge of sending “moving pictures through the air” that the world of screens we now live in became possible. By conceiving and building an entirely electronic video system in the 1920s, Farnsworth achieved an epic breakthrough in what humans could do to with quantum forces and particles.
An effort is now under way to celebrate the Centennial of that pivotal moment in human evolution.
The plans are in their early, formative stages.
In the meantime, starting in October 2025, we are going to Countdown to the Centennial – posting over 100 weeks the Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Video. Start with the Introduction published Sept 7, 2025.
That we are not more familiar with Farnsworth – or how he changed the world – is one of the oddities of history and a culture that reveres innovation.
We have two years to correct that oversight.
Care to join the Crusade?
For more information, contact the sponsors, follow our Facebook Page or sign up for the Centennial Countdown newsletter so every Milestone will show up in your inbox every week.
The Countdown promises to be a compelling journey through both the technology and the cultural changes that it spawned. And when it’s over, followers will have a much better appreciation of the man indispensable whose contribution made it all possible.
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**Einstein is most often associated with Relativity, E=mc2, nuclear energy, andthe atomic bomb. What is lost to history is that his first theories made television possible decades before anybody figured out how to split an atom. When discussing his Oscar-winning feature Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan likes to say “we live in Oppenheimer’s world…” But unless we all have an atomic bomb in our living room, we actually live in Farnsworth’s world – and Christopher Nolan made the wrong damn movie!