To have the right idea is one thing;
To have the right idea and make it work is everything.

––Roger Penrose

Meet Philo T. Farnsworth, the teenager who had the right idea and the young adult who made it work.

…While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, the summer of 1921 found Philo T. Farnsworth… strapped to a horse-drawn disc-harrow, cultivating a field row by row, turning the soil and dreaming about television to relieve the monotony.

Long story short: The idea for a fully electronic camera tube occurred to Philo T. Farnsworth in the summer of 1921. In the winter of 1922, he drew a sketch of that idea for his high school science teacher. In 1926 – after four long years during which he expected to find his idea in the next science magazine he opened – some well-heeled bankers set him up with a grubstake and a loft in San Francisco. In January 1927, he applied for a patent for his idea and went to work to build a fully electronic television system entirely from scratch.

On September 7, 1927 he successfully tested the world's first fully electronic television system.

And the rest, as they say, is history - though largely forgotten.

• (00:00:00) - 100 Years of Television: The Story of Philo T. Farn