this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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When I was taught that Philo Farnsworth, a "farmer" who "invented" television by using the idea of plowing a field in parallel lines to display an image, I was completely dumbfounded. A farmer figured out how to build a vacuum tube, fire an electron beam, deflect it at phosphor-coated surface, and do so in lines, varying the intensity, to display an image? This simplistic "history" skips about 50 years of progress in vacuum tube design and absolutely fascinating mechanical television.
On that note, The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good book about scientific progress, and really drives a point about incremental nature progress.