Television was invented twice: mechanically by John Logie Baird, who transmitted moving silhouettes in 1925 and demonstrated a working system in London in January 1926, and electronically by Philo Farnsworth, a 21-year-old American farm boy whose image dissector sent the first all-electronic picture on 7 September 1927. Electronic television won — and Farnsworth won the patent war.
Both men stood on Paul Nipkow's 1884 spinning-disk scanner, which broke pictures into lines. Baird's mechanical system reached the public first — the BBC broadcast with it from 1929 — but spinning disks were a dead end: flickering, tiny, fragile. Farnsworth's electronic scanning, with no moving parts, became every television set ever made.
