Warning: There is no travel-related content in this entry.

I almost missed it.

Actually I did miss it. Television turned 75 this weekend. TV's are like toasters these days and it's hard to get worked up over technology your parents know how to use, but how many other inventions of the preceding century have had such an effect on our day-to-day lives? Especially my life.

I've worked in television in one capacity or another for nearly ten years. I still have no idea how it works. Something about a beam of electrons wiping back and forth across a phosphorescent plate of glass, varying in intensity to create a new image every 30th of a second. Where do you get the electrons? How do you tell them what to do on the screen? No idea.

Or so says his 94-year-old widow.
But somehow three-quarters of a century ago a farmer from Idaho named Philo T. Farnsworth figured out how instantly to transmit moving pictures from one place to another. He even had an idea of what was going to happen to the world when his invention was unleashed upon it. Or so says his 94-year-old widow who's still alive today.

As the Boston Globe quotes her, it seems his favorite television moment was the one I would most like to have seen.

"Even before Phil got his first transmitter, he told us what television would do for the world," she says, her voice strong and clear. "Everything that he said would happen, happened."

On the July day in 1969 when the technology he created made it possible to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, Farnsworth turned to his wife and said, "This has made it all worthwhile." He died two years later.

It's as if it was planned.
It's as if it was planned that a medium capable of uniting the world for history-making events came of age just in time for the world to witness one of humanity's greatest accomplishments.

I'm amazed that only a hundred years ago or so, the only way we knew of distant places was by letters carried over great distances. In a relative instant, humans have created telegraphs, then telephones, then radios, then televisions, then the internet. Each one making the world a bit smaller.

I see it every day at work, but I still get a little excited to see engineers tuning in a live signal from a crew out on a story, or in our helicopter, or over a satellite hundreds of miles away. The ease with which television now transports us to distant places will always be a wonder to me. (Even if it is to see a reporter stand outside a dark courthouse talking about what happened six hours ago.)

He can be a bit grandiose, but he's got the idea right.
In Ted Turner's more lucid moments he talks about television's unique ability to unite humankind and its potential to end wars, create understanding and ensure world peace. He can be a bit grandiose, but he's got the idea right. Too often we condemn the medium for what some have done to it, forgetting what it has been and what it can be.

There are days I'm proud to work in the television industry and days I'm either ashamed or indifferent. Unfortunately the latter occur far more often. But thinking about what this invention has done in its short life makes going to work in the morning a little easier.

A little.|