Birthplace of Television - Philo T. Farnsworth

Every work day for six years on Pier 39 I walked from the BART station up Sansome, right past where the Father of Television had his workshop. It’s also not far from where CNET used to be, at the base of Telegraph Hill. If you find yourself in the area, look for the Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the name of the documentary about how they got there.

TIL he was born in Utah and died in Utah in the seventies after inventing TV in 1922. He was fourteen years old when the idea came to him.

Brittanica: Farnsworth was a technical prodigy from an early age. An avid reader of science magazines as a teenager, he became interested in the problem of television and was convinced that mechanical systems that used, for example, a spinning disc would be too slow to scan and assemble images many times a second. Only an electronic system could scan and assemble an image fast enough, and by 1922 he had worked out the basic outlines of electronic television.

Just a few short blocks from Fisherman’s Wharf…