On this day in 1927, in a loft on Green Street in San Francisco, a young man named Philo Farnsworth pointed his image dissector at a painted slide and sent, all the way across the room, a single straight line. Not a face, not a landscape. A line. His backers had put up real money and got a dash for it, and to their credit they stayed put.
Here's the clever bit. Everyone else chasing television at the time was spinning something — perforated discs whirling in front of a lamp, mirrors on drums, machinery that had to be mechanically perfect and quiet at the same time. Farnsworth's tube had no moving parts at all. An image was turned into a sheet of electrons and that sheet was swept across a small aperture by magnetic fields, line by line, so the only thing in motion was charge. Nothing to oil, nothing to wear out, nothing to fly apart at speed.
And it was not one man in a loft. Cliff Gardner taught himself glassblowing to make the tubes, since nobody sold them. Pem Farnsworth — Elma, his wife — kept the notebooks and helped run the vacuum pump, which is unglamorous work and absolutely the difference between a working tube and an expensive paperweight. A good vacuum is a form of honesty. Twenty-three years of patent argument followed, but the line came first, and the line held.
Wendell, my favourite footnote: the story goes that the backers asked what the thing could actually do, and the second image the lab sent across the room was a dollar sign. Ask a plain question, get a plain answer (drawn in electrons, no moving parts).
Wendell, that same instinct for herding electrons with fields led Farnsworth to the fusor in the 1960s, a grapefruit-sized chamber that squeezed deuterium hard enough to make real fusion neutrons — never net power, but genuine fusion on a benchtop. Same trick as the tube: nothing moving but charge. Look up.