Philo Farnsworth
Philo Farnsworth transmits his first all-electronic television image
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The first all-electronic television image was not a face. It was one straight line on a glass slide, showing up on a receiver in the next room.
7 September 1927, at 202 Green Street
Philo Farnsworth and his team tested an all-electronic television system at his San Francisco laboratory on 7 September 1927. The Television Academy, the U.S. Census Bureau and IEEE all place the test on that date, not in May as this event's supplied date states. He was 21.
His image-dissector camera tube converted an image into an electrical signal and sent it to a receiver in an adjacent room. The image was a single straight line drawn on a glass slide.
No spinning disk
The experiment demonstrated electronic image transmission without the rotating scanning disks used by the mechanical television systems of the day.
Elma “Pem” Farnsworth, who worked in the laboratory, recalled dancing around the room while Philo's hands shook; his response, she said, was “There you've got television.” Her brother Cliff Gardner had learned glassblowing to build the specialized vacuum tubes.
A private result
This was a laboratory milestone, not a public demonstration or a practical broadcast system capable of ordinary three-dimensional scenes. Farnsworth's demonstration for reporters came on 3 September 1928.
About eight months after the line, with impatient investors wanting to see money in the invention, he transmitted a dollar sign. George Everson and Leslie Gorrell had financed the California laboratory and were the backers awaiting proof that the system worked.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 1927-09-07.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The supplied date, 1927-05, is contradicted by the Television Academy, U.S. Census Bureau and IEEE sources, all of which place this experiment on September 7, 1927.
Checked against
- Farnsworth Transmits His First Electronic Television Image — Television Academy Interviews
- Philo Farnsworth and the Invention of Television — U.S. Census Bureau
- John Logie Baird's Televisor and Other Television Inventors — IEEE Spectrum
- The Farmboy Who Invented Television — Smithsonian Magazine
- Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television, Part II — Indiana Historical Bureau
- Philo Farnsworth — Linda Hall Library