In 1921, a 14-year-old Idaho farm boy plowing a field imagined scanning images line by line with a beam of electrons. This deep dive follows Philo Farnsworth from tinkering with a Delco generator and rewiring a motor for his mother’s washing machine to sketching an all-electronic television on his chemistry teacher’s blackboard at 16.

The episode explains why mechanical Nipkow disk systems were a dead end, how his image dissector tube transmitted its first image in San Francisco in 1927, and how RCA and David Sarnoff fought him over patents after Vladimir Zworykin visited his lab. It also covers his radar display work, the Farnsworth Fusor, the collapse of his company and the Apollo 11 broadcast that gave him peace.

• How electrons removed the speed limits of spinning mechanical discs
• Why he left the Naval Academy to protect his patents and how backers George Everson and Leslie Gorrell funded his lab
• Transmitting a straight line, a dollar sign and his wife Pem with her eyes shut against blazing arc lamps
• How teacher Justin Tolman’s recreated 1922 sketch helped win the patent fight that RCA lost, and why it was a Pyrrhic victory
• His fusion device using inertial electrostatic confinement, his financial ruin and his roughly 300 patents