By Kathleen Krull
A farm boy driving a plow in long straight rows looks down at the dirt and works out how to send a picture through the air.
Philo Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a Utah log cabin with no electricity in it. When his family moved to an Idaho farm that had a generator, he found a stack of technology magazines up in the attic and read every one. He was fourteen, driving a horse-drawn plow back and forth across a potato field, when he looked at the rows he'd cut and saw something nobody else had. You could take a picture apart into lines just like those, send them one at a time, and put them back together at the far end. He sketched the whole idea on the blackboard for his chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman. Seven years later, in a rented lab in San Francisco, he switched on his machine and transmitted the first all-electronic television image. It was a single straight line. What followed was years in court against a company far bigger than he was.
The science here is graspable, which is rarer than it sounds in a book about an invention. Scanning a picture into lines and sending them one at a time is something a child can actually hold in their head, and once they have it, the television across the room looks a little different to them. Greg Couch's art carries a lot of it, full of light and dust and glow, so the idea arrives feeling like a vision instead of a diagram. And Philo is fourteen when it comes to him, which means a lot to a child who keeps being told to wait until they're older for real ideas. The text is denser than the picture-book format suggests, so it reads well for a strong reader on their own, or at any age as a read-aloud.