<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway in This is Anonymous America, where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find those

<v Speaker 1>heroes who did something amazing and then got lost to

<v Speaker 1>the hands of time. Over the next twenty four hours,

<v Speaker 1>something like a billion people around the world will sit

<v Speaker 1>down and stare into a piece of glass that shows

<v Speaker 1>them the whole world, and almost none of them could

<v Speaker 1>tell you the name of the fourteen year old farm

<v Speaker 1>boy who invented it, sketching the idea on a chalkboard

<v Speaker 1>in a high school chemistry class in Idaho. Filo Taylor

<v Speaker 1>Farnsworth was born in nineteen oh six in a log

<v Speaker 1>cabin in Utah. He was the son of Mormon farmers.

<v Speaker 1>When he was eleven, the family moved to a ranch

<v Speaker 1>near rigged By, Idaho, and young Pilo discovered that the

<v Speaker 1>new place had something the old one didn't. It was

<v Speaker 1>wired for electricity, and he became obsessed. He devoured every

<v Speaker 1>science magazine he could find. He repaired the old farms generator.

<v Speaker 1>He found a burned out electric motor, rebuilt it and

<v Speaker 1>rigged it to run his mother's hand crank washing machine

<v Speaker 1>so she wouldn't have to He was by any honest measure,

<v Speaker 1>a genius, and he was also plowing potato fields to

<v Speaker 1>help feed his family. And it was out there, walking

<v Speaker 1>behind a horse drawn plow that a fourteen year old

<v Speaker 1>boy had one of the most consequential ideas of the

<v Speaker 1>twentieth century. From Hay Dad Productions. This is anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>Now here's the problem, young Filo was chewing on. All

<v Speaker 1>over the world, inventors were racing to build television, a

<v Speaker 1>way to send moving pictures through the air, and most

<v Speaker 1>of them were trying to do it mechanically, using spinning

<v Speaker 1>metal disk full of tiny holes, and it wasn't working.

<v Speaker 1>The pictures are small, they were dim, they were crude,

<v Speaker 1>and that's all they were ever going to be. Filo

<v Speaker 1>plow in that field, row by row, back and forth,

<v Speaker 1>back and forth, looked down at the neat parallel lines

<v Speaker 1>he was cutting into the ground, and it struck him.

<v Speaker 1>What if you could capture in image the same way,

<v Speaker 1>not all at once, but line by line, scan it,

<v Speaker 1>one road a time so quickly that the human eye

<v Speaker 1>would stitch it all back together into a single moving picture,

<v Speaker 1>and do it all with a beam of electrons, no

<v Speaker 1>spinning disk, no moving parts at all. And that idea

<v Speaker 1>electronic scanning line by line is, in its essence, how

<v Speaker 1>television worked for the next seventy five years. He could

<v Speaker 1>keep it inside. He sketched the entire system out on

<v Speaker 1>the blackboard for his high school chemistry teacher, a very

<v Speaker 1>patient man named Justin Tolman. Tolman didn't fully get it,

<v Speaker 1>but he could see the boy was on to something,

<v Speaker 1>so he saved the sketch. Filo spent the next several

<v Speaker 1>years scraping together backers and building his lab, and in

<v Speaker 1>nineteen twenty seven, in a lab in San Francisco, at

<v Speaker 1>the age of twenty one, he transmitted the first all

<v Speaker 1>electronic television image in history, a single, clean, straight line.

<v Speaker 1>A few months later, he transmitted the image of a

<v Speaker 1>dollar sign, reportedly because one of his investors had asked,

<v Speaker 1>and not too gently, when they were going to finally

<v Speaker 1>see some dollars. Out of all of this, he had

<v Speaker 1>done it. A farm boy had built the future with

<v Speaker 1>his own hands, and that's when the giant showed up.

<v Speaker 1>The Radio Corporation of America RCA was the most powerful

<v Speaker 1>electronics company on earth, and it was run by a fierce,

<v Speaker 1>brilliant businessman named David Sarnoff. RCA fully intended to own

<v Speaker 1>television the way it already owned radio. Sarnoff sent his

<v Speaker 1>top television scientist to tour Filo's lab, and then URCA

<v Speaker 1>offered to buy the young inventor out for one hundred

<v Speaker 1>thousand dollars. Filo said no. So RCA did the other

<v Speaker 1>thing that powerful companies do. It moved to claim the

<v Speaker 1>patents for itself, and it buried Philo Farnsworth under a

<v Speaker 1>mountain of lawsuits. The central case came down to one

<v Speaker 1>simple question, who really invented electronic television? First, RCA had

<v Speaker 1>armies of lawyers, oceans of money, and all the time

<v Speaker 1>in the world. Filo Farnsworth had the memory of a

<v Speaker 1>chalkboard in Idaho. And then his old chemistry teacher walked

<v Speaker 1>into the hearing room. Justin Tolman took the stand and

<v Speaker 1>testified that a fourteen year old boy had drawn the

<v Speaker 1>complete concept for him years before RCA ever claimed it,

<v Speaker 1>and that he could still reproduce that sketch from memory.

<v Speaker 1>And he did, and it matched the patent office rule.

<v Speaker 1>The priority of invention belonged to Filo Farnsworth. RCA, for

<v Speaker 1>the first time in its history, was forced to pay

<v Speaker 1>another inventor royalties to use his idea. It should have

<v Speaker 1>been the great triumph the Filo's life, but the timing

<v Speaker 1>was cruel. Right as those patents were finally set to

<v Speaker 1>pay real money, the Second World War froze commercial television

<v Speaker 1>production for years, and by the time it thawed, Farnsworth's

<v Speaker 1>key patents were close to expiring, and RCA, with all

<v Speaker 1>its money and all its reach, stamped its own name

<v Speaker 1>on television and it to America. To this day, plenty

<v Speaker 1>of people still credit RCACH chairman David Sarnoff as the

<v Speaker 1>so called father of television. Now, Filo got some money,

<v Speaker 1>but never a fortune, and never the fame. He battled

<v Speaker 1>depression and drinking. He went on holding hundreds of other patents,

<v Speaker 1>pioneering work on radar, on the baby incubator, even early

<v Speaker 1>research toward nuclear fusion. But the world had already moved

<v Speaker 1>on without ever learning his name. There's a story that

<v Speaker 1>in July of nineteen sixty nine, Filo Farnsworth sat in

<v Speaker 1>his living room and watched on television as Neil Armstrong

<v Speaker 1>stepped down onto the surface of the Moon. A live

<v Speaker 1>picture beamed a quarter of a million miles through empty

<v Speaker 1>space and into his own home using the electronic principle.

<v Speaker 1>He had dreamed up as a boy walking behind a plow.

<v Speaker 1>And he turned to his wife and said quietly, this

<v Speaker 1>made it all worthwhile. Filo passed away in nineteen seventy one,

<v Speaker 1>a name and a footnote when he should have been

<v Speaker 1>a name every child knew. So the next time you

<v Speaker 1>switch on a screen, any screen at all, remember that

<v Speaker 1>boy in the Idaho field who looked down at the

<v Speaker 1>rose he was plowing, and saw, of all things in

<v Speaker 1>the world, a way to send a picture to everyone.

<v Speaker 1>That's Philo Farnsworth, and that's anonymous America.