The latest issue of WIRED magazine includes Philo Farnsworth’s potato field among the short list of notable locations that have inspired great leaps in technology:
While plowing a field at age 14, Farnsworth — who had been studying electrons and vacuum tubes — looked out across the even furrows and was struck with an idea. He could project moving images line by line, and the eye would stitch them together: “I have abandoned the old idea of a whirling television disk with its motors and other contraptions. A simple beam of light now does the trick,” he would later say. “The moment I discovered tools… which would enable television to be done without moving parts, the invention seemed almost simultaneous; as a matter of fact, simultaneously with the discovery that there was an electron and a photoelectric effect.”