America on the Screen

Nearly a century ago in a nondescript facility in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, an engineer with the unlikely name of Philo T. Farnsworth broadcast the first live electronic image across space, that of a simple black line inscribed on a glass plate and backlit by a carbon arc lamp. From that initial broadcast on September 7, 1927, ultimately followed I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone, All in the Family and MASH, The Simpsons and Seinfeld, Walter Cronkite’s announcement of the Kennedy assassination, images of the Apollo moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9/11 attacks; The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. Farnsworth, a periphrastic inventor and devout Mormon, was the first to receive the federal patent for a television, over competitors like Westinghouse’s Vladimir K. Zworykin.