To have right idea is one thing;
to have the right idea and make it work is everything.
--Roger Penrose

You've probably never hear of Philo T. Farnsworth.

Maybe it's time you did.

We take our screen-based 2st century for granted, but the long-neglected fact is that every video screen on the planet can trace its origins to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922 - when he was all of 14 years old.

On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth conducted the first successful experiment with an all-electronic television system based on the sketch that he'd drawn five years earlier. That nobody had come up with a similar viable idea – least of the well-financed scientists an engineers of industry who were chasing the same dream – is a testament to how far Farnsworth was "ahead of his time" (actually, Farnsworth was precisely of his time; it's just that most of his contemporaries were still stuck in the 19th century).

The same year that Farnsworth conducted his first successful demonstration of electronic video, he applied for patents for his inventions. Those patents were granted in 1930, and he spent most of that decade fending off challenges to them. By the end of the decade he had compiled a portfolio of more than 100 patents, all of them essential to the new medium when it came out of hibernation after World War II.

That Farnsworth's name is not more familiar is one of the great oddities of our tech-dominated culture.

That oversight can be corrected by celebrating the Centennial of Television come September 7, 2027.

To "countdown" to that date (and raise global awareness along the way), we'll be posting the "Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television" here in podcast form and on the web at tvcentennial.com

It's going to be fun journey and we're going to introduce a lot of other intriguing characters along the way.

Won't you join us?