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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented. To celebrate the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to countdown the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television.
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There is exactly one year left until the Centennial of Television.
99 years ago today – September 7, 1927 – something happened in a loft in San Francisco that set the cornerstone for the world that we live in today.
All Screens All The Time
How are you reading this?
You are reading it on a screen, right?
We live in a culture that is awash with screens.
It seems that everything we do now – every form of commerce, culture. and communications – involves some kind of screen.
We conduct all our business on screens.
We spend our days at work staring at screens.
Then we go home for some relaxing downtime and…. more screens.
They come in all sizes: from the hand-held screens we carry in our pockets to the wall-sized panels in our living rooms to the Jumbotrons at stadiums and concerts.
And we take it all for granted.
In The Beginning…
But it was not always this way.
There was in fact one moment 99 years ago that put this entire transformation into motion.
The entire screen-based culture that we are immersed in today started on this day in 1927.
Here is the proof: This is (a recreation of) the first moving image ever made entirely with electrons:1
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By now anybody who knows me knows who and what I’m talking about.
I’ve only been hammering on this theme for… oh, fifty-plus years now.
Something vital has been lost to history.
One of the seminal geniuses of the 20th century has been left out of the storyline.
His name was Philo T. Farnsworth.
He was born in 1906 – importantly, the year after Albert Einstein published four scientific papers that altered the course of human understanding.
Uniquely Gifted
Despite growing up on a farm in Idaho, Philo T. Farnsworth had an innate understanding of Einstein’s strange new universe.
And he was uniquely gifted to put that understanding to work in a way that changed the world as much as anything that has happened over the past hundred years.
At some early age Philo confessed to his father his heart’s desire that he had been “born an inventor.”
And then he seized on a fanciful notion floating around at the time.
It seemed inevitable in the first decades of the 20th century that motion pictures and radio would somehow merge to “send moving pictures through the air.”
So “television,” young Philo reasoned, might be a handy thing to come up with to launch his career as an inventor.
And that is exactly what he did.
Converting Light
At the time, the great minds of science and industry were wrestling with 19th century solutions to a 20th century problem by converting light into electricity by mechanical means.2
What the moment demanded was somebody who could take new ideas like Albert Einstein’s and transform them into something previously unimaginable.
So, this teenager on a farm in Idaho taught himself everything he could about electrons and cathode ray tubes.
He immersed himself in the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.
And for the purposes of inventing television, he absorbed the first of Einstein’s 1905 papers, which described the photoelectric effect: the process by which light becomes electricity.
In the summer of 1921 – the same year Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect – 14-year-old Farnsworth was struck with what must have been a divine inspiration.
The “Electrical Image”
Rather than scanning the light reflected off an object, he would create an electrical counterpart to the optical image – and then scan the electrons emanating from that invisible “electrical image.”
It all seems so obvious now, but at the time the idea was simple, elegant, and entirely novel. So novel, in fact, that nobody came up with a similar idea (that worked) for another ten years!
In the late winter or early spring of 1922, the teenager who wanted to invent television drew this sketch for his high school science teacher:
Every video screen on the planet can trace its origins to that sketch.
Five years later, with seed financing from some bankers and industrialists in San Francisco, Farnsworth successfully tested the first working model of the technology we take for granted today.
That fuzzy first picture on September 7, 1927 was television’s “Big Bang” moment.
It was more than just another invention. It was an epic breakthrough in what humans could do with the fundamental forces of nature.
And everything since – from I Love Lucy to, well, the gang on The Big Bang Theory, from Pong to the iPhone – became possible on that day.
The Cosmic Well
Albert Einstein published four seminal theories in 1905.
In the fourth paper, the thought process that began with converting light into electricity delivered him to the theory that defines the strong nuclear force in the most famous equation ever written: E=mc2.
So, television was drawn forth from the same well of cosmic knowledge that gave also us nuclear power and atomic bombs.
When Christopher Nolan was promoting his 2023 blockbuster biopic, he would often say that because of the specter of nuclear annihilation, “we live in Oppenheimer’s world.”
But unless we all have an atomic bomb in our pocket or in our living room, we really live in Philo Farnsworth’s world and Christopher Nolan made the wrong damn movie!
It’s Time to Celebrate!
We are now exactly one year from the Centennial of a pivotal moment in human history – and the clock is ticking.
It’s time we recognize the occasion for all that it means to our understanding of the world we live in.
That’s why I have been counting down to the Centennial by recalling the Top 100 Milestones in the First 100 Years of Television and Video.
The Countdown began on Sept 7, 2025. I have already posted 50-some episodes. They average roughly 12-minutes each and a have all kinds of interesting and amusing anecdotes from your favorite memories of television and video.
Now I have an ask for all you who are listening.
Won’t you help us spread the word?
Don’t just ‘like’ this post.
Please share it in your social media.
If you’re a Substacker, find a pithy quote and restack it.
Let’s mount a global commemoration of the day video arrived on the planet, and celebrate the countless ways its invention has enriched our lives.
And if it has been shared with you then you know what to do.
Paul Schatzkin
September 7, 2026
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1 In 1977, colleagues from Farnsworth’s “lab gang” of the 1920s joined forces to recreate the first successful electronic television system to mark the Golden Anniversary.
2 Pictured here is a contraption that the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird used to transmit some semblance of moving images over the air as early as 1926. Baird is often cited as “the inventor of TV,” but nothing of his invention made it into the television systems of the modern era.
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