Television isn't just moving pictures that fly through the air. There is sound, too. And the clear, static-free audio we take for granted owes its existence to another of the electronics industry's unsung heroes: Edwin Howard Armstrong.

• (00:00:00) - We Should Have Laughed at Edison
• (00:00:21) - 100 Years of Television: Countdown to 2027
• (00:01:29) - In the Elevator of Edwin Howard Armstrong
• (00:07:38) - 100 Years of Television

In the 1930s, video technology evolved rapidly in a world-wide race to deliver television to the marketplace.

In the United States, the principal contestants were the giant Radio Corporation of America and a tiny company spearheaded by the wunderkind inventor from Utah by way of San Francisco, Philo T. Farnsworth.

RCA had the capital, the technical resources, and the market clout to extend their dominance in all things radio into the nascent new industry of television.

All Farnsworth had were the fundamental patents for the technology that made television possible

In the spring of 1934, Farnsworth accepted an invitation from the prestigious Franklin Institute of Philadelphia to conduct the world’s first full-scale public demonstration of television in the summer of 1934.

The arrival of real (electronic) television was announced in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sept 3, 1927 - even as companies like AT&T were getting headlines for their mechanical systems along with independent experimenters like Britain's John Logie Baird. But once the news of Philo Farnsworth's invention hit the wire services, the race was on to reap the rewards of bringing a new medium to the marketplace.

• (00:00:00) - 100 Years of Television: A countdown to the 100th
• (00:01:46) - The Man Who Invented Television
• (00:12:00) - 100 Years of Television: Countdown to the Centennial

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

In the last episode, we talked about cathode rays and radio waves. But before this meandering journey through the history of science and technology can reach its destination — the actual inventing of television — physics itself has to make, quite literally, a quantum leap.

Today’s installment covers two more technologies needed to achieve real television. One is another step toward the electronic picture. The other redefines how those pictures would be sent and received.

• (00:00:00) - 100 Years of Television: Before 1927
• (00:02:02) - The Years That Changed Television
• (00:11:42) - 100 Years of TV

Continuing our look back on the myriad observations, discoveries and inventions that preceded 1927.

In the last episode, we talked about the evolution of electrical science in the 19th century and the first advances in modern communications – the telegraph and the telephone – and the first discoveries and inventions around the interaction of light and electromagnetism.

In this episode we'll look at the first genuine attempts at television, and the advances that preceded Farnsworth's historic breakthrough..

Given the indispensable role that electricity plays in modern life, it's worth remembering: humans of some kind have roamed the Earth for hundreds of millennia, but have only mastered electromagnetism over the past two hundred years.

Across the one hundred years, numerous observations, discoveries and inventions brought science to the thresold of "moving pictures that can fly though the air.

In this episode of 100 Years of Television we dive into the earliest experiements that explored the interactions of light with electricity.