Here’s another inventor that you’ve probably never heard of: Philo T. Farnsworth. Phil invented something everyone in most developed countries has — an all-electronic television.

Before Farnsworth, radio with pictures — what we call television today — was an unrealized vision that many folks had worked on but never achieved real success.

One idea was a mechanical sort of contraption that could transmit pictures, but it couldn’t handle the job of conveying a live scene or even films like were being shown in the growing cinema of the 1920’s.  Another man,Vladimir K. Zworykin, had a similar idea to Farnsworth’s using an electron scanning tube, but he couldn’t get it to work properly, and after a demonstration was told by Westinghouse Corporation executives to “get back to work on something useful.”

In 1927, a full seven years before Zworkin finally got his system truly working, Phil Farnsworth built and demonstrated not only the first fully functional video camera tube but also the first fully working fully functional and complete all-electronic television system.  Not only that, Farnsworth was the first to demonstrate his system to the public.  That did not stop Zworkin’s employer, RCA Corporation, from trying to claim Farnsworth’s patents, but eventually after years of legal wrangling, Farnsworth prevailed and was legally and officially the inventor of television as we know it.

So like Nikola Tesla (the true inventor or radio) Farnsworth had to fight a huge patent battle over his invention, and eventually he prevailed. And also like Tesla, he wasn’t sure about that his invention was a positive force in society.

“I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives,” his son Kent once recalled. “Throughout my childhood his reaction to television was, ‘There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.’ ”

That is, until 1969. Here’s the story as told by one of his grandchildren:

In a 1996 videotaped interview by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Elma Farnsworth recounts Philo’s change of heart about the value of television, after seeing how it showed man walking on the moon, in real time, to millions of viewers:

Interviewer: The image dissector was used to send shots back from the moon to earth.

Elma Farnsworth: Right.

Interviewer: What did Phil think of that?

Elma Farnsworth: We were watching it, and, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Phil turned to me and said, “Pem, this has made it all worthwhile.” Before then, he wasn’t too sure.

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Philo T. Farnsworth in his laboratory in 1940

Engineering specifications for the Farnsworth Dissector (aka the television camera)

Surely, in his wildest dreams in the 1920’s, Farnsworth never thought that the invention he was working on would one day be used to beam back live coverage of humanity’s first step on another celestial body.

And that is the way of science and engineering: the things we create and perfect today may well have uses far beyond the scope of our individual imaginations, perhaps even in our lifetime.