On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1921, 14-year-old Philo Farnsworth was working a field on his family’s farm in Idaho when the neat rows stretching out behind him gave him an idea. What if a picture could be broken into lines, transmitted electronically, and reassembled somewhere else? The farm boy had begun imagining the technology that would become electronic television.

Daniel Stashower, author of The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, shares the story of how Farnsworth pursued that idea from rural Idaho to laboratories in California, eventually finding himself in a patent battle with David Sarnoff and the enormous Radio Corporation of America.

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