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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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The Medium Is A Fixture
By 1957, the number of households in the United State had grown to more than 51 million. Nearly 40 million of those households had invested in at least one television set, making the new medium a fixture for nearly three quarters of the country.
The typical screen measured 17-to-21 inches and sold for $150 to $200 (about $1,600–$2,100 in 2026 dollars). Fewer than 150,000 color receivers were in use, each costing $500–$600 (or $5,500–$6,500 in 2026). And average viewing time had risen to four or five hours a day – easily eclipsing both radio listening and newspaper reading.
The Big Three networks – NBC, CBS, and ABC – extended their reach with coaxial cable and microwave relays linking nearly every major city. The business model was still based on advertising, but the familiar “single sponsor” format behind programs like Texaco Star Theater and Kraft Television Theatre was fading in favor of breaks with commercials from numerous sponsors.
On the West Coast, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu studios showed the industry that Hollywood production values could translate into weekly series. Their flagship show, I Love Lucy, was consistently the highest-rated program on the air, along with other popular Desilu productions like Our Miss Brooks and December Bride.
Hollywood Thaws
Desilu’s success helped thaw Hollywood’s uneasy alliance with television, and by the mid 1950s all the major studios were feeding the network’s voracious appetite for fresh programs. Warner Bros. went straight to the small screen in 1955 with Cheyenne, the first hour-long Western series for television, followed by Maverick in 1957. These shows were made on film at the Burbank lot and distributed through ABC, creating the template for the “studio television” model that would dominate TV for decades.
Columbia’s Screen Gems turned out a steady slate of family and adventure series like Father Knows Best, Rin Tin Tin, Circus Boy, and The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, while also mining the vaults to fill local TV station schedules with syndicated film anthologies like Adventure Theater, and Thrillerama Theater. MGM and Paramount also licensed their theatrical features to television.
At the other end of the budget spectrum, quiz shows were as popular with audiences as they were cost effective. Shows like The $64,000 Question on CBS reached a third of TV households every week. Lighthearted, banter-filled panel shows like What’s My Line and To Tell The Truth – both on CBS – were equally popular primetime fare.
The audience for television was vast and diverse. But it is unlikely that anybody in the audience at home recognized the man who invented the appliance in their living room when he made his one and only television appearance on the CBS panel show, I’ve Got A Secret, on June 3, 1957.
When host Garry Moore beckoned his next contestant to the stage, a gaunt man with a high forehead and wavy-but-receding hair ambled out from behind the curtain. It had been nearly 20 years since Philo Farnsworth had been in the limelight, but the host had to refrain from using his guest’s actual name.
Dr. X
“We’re not going to identify this contestant,” Moore told panelists Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Henry Morgan, and Faye Emerson, “because to identify him would tip off his secret. We will call him simply Dr X. Now, Doctor, if you will whisper your secret to me, we will show it at the same time to the folks out there.”
“Dr. X” leans into Garry Moore and the screen shows, “I invented electronic television.”
The studio audience gasps slightly.
Moore then adds, “Now, wait a minute. There is even more.”
“Dr. X” leans in again, and the audience sees “In 1922, when I was 14 years old.”
The audience responds with more gasps and applause.
To get the panelists off in the right direction, Moore instructs them that Dr. X’s secret “concerns something that he did…” and hands the first round of questions off to Bill Cullen. After discerning that the secret involves some kind of machine, Cullen asks, “Is this some kind of a machine that might be painful when it’s used?”
To which Dr. X wryly replies, “Yes, sometimes it’s most painful.”
The questioning is handed off to Jayne Meadows, who determines that Dr. X works in some kind of laboratory and then inexplicably asks, “Would this remotely or in any way be connected with psychiatric cases?”
The audience snickers, and Garry Moore gets a full laugh when he says, “In very rare interest instances it’s been known to cause a few.”
Even Dr. X gets a good laugh out of that one.
Henry Morgan asks Dr. X if he’s a dentist.
Poor Faye Emerson doesn’t even get a chance before Moore cuts off the game.
“I think you fellas have led yourself down the garden path,” Moore says. “Let’s cut them off… I’ll forfeit the money and tell you that… this is the famous Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented electronic television.”
Yup. The famous Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth. So famous that none of the four people working in the industry his invention made possible has any idea who he is.
Are You Sorry?
After the big reveal, light hearted banter ensues.
Henry Morgan asks, “Doctor, truthfully…. are you sorry?”
Farnsworth says, “No,” but Garry Moore chimes in, “I asked him the same question. He said, ‘Sometimes.’”
Moore asks Farnsworth to describe what he invented.
Farnsworth explains that “there had been attempts to devise a television system using mechanical discs and rotating mirrors…” and that his contribution was “to take out all the moving parts and make the thing entirely electronic. And that was the concept that I had when I was just a freshman in high school.”1
Moore continues, “He was the one who put electronics into television, which makes it possible for us to have whatever it is that we have now.”
Garry Moore then takes the party line, noting that “as the machines developed, there were other people who made contributions…” and asks, “How many patents do you hold, Sir?”
And Farnsworth replies, “Something in excess of 165 American patents.”
When Moore asks, “What are you working on now?”
Farnsworth answers by describing what is now known as High Definition Television (HDTV). By making better use of bandwidth, he explains, “we can eventually get in excess of 2000 lines instead of [the] 525” that the NTSC adopted in 19412. He adds that this, “will make for a much sharper picture,” – effectively predicting in 1957 the technology that would not become standard until the late 1990s.
What’s Next?
He also mentions, almost in passing, that he’s been thinking about “taming of the H-bomb – the hydrogen fusion problem.”
As one does.
At which point the emcee does his job. “Doctor Farnsworth,” Moore concludes, “we could talk for many hours, but unfortunately, television being what it is, it’s your baby, and we’re out of time.”
Garry Moore then hands Philo T. Farnsworth a carton of Winstons, $80 cash, and offers “our eternal gratitude. I’d be out of work if it weren’t for you.”
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The entire Farnsworth appearance on I’ve Got A Secret is on YouTube.
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1 Two points of clarification:
1. The Countdown is focused on September 7, 1927, the date that Farnsworth’s invention was first successfully demonstrated on a work bench. But to inventors, the conception – when the idea first occurs – is considered the moment of invention. The first successful test is considered “reduction to practice” of the original idea.
2. Farnsworth’s inspiration came sometime in the summer of 1921, when he was 14 years old. He turned 15 on August 19 of that year. So it is plausible that he was 14 when he got the idea, but he would have been 15 in the winter or spring of of 1922 when he first sketched it out for his high school science teacher.
2 The adoption of the “NTSC” standard of 525 lines per frame, 30 frames per second, and six megahertz per channel is covered in Milestone #92, Standards.
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