ABSTRACT
On September 7, 1927, a largely self-taught electrical engineer from Idaho named Philo T. Farnsworth stood in front of a screen in San Francisco, California, upon which a small line appeared. Farnsworth called out to an assistant in the next room to rotate a slide containing an image of a triangle, and the line changed position as he did so. The slide sat in front of a special vacuum tube called an image dissector that transformed the light passing through it into an electromagnetic wave that was transmitted to the screen in the other room. While the resulting image failed to depict the entire triangle, this experiment represented the first demonstration of a fully electronic television. 1
