On July 3rd, 1957, a man introduced only as "Dr. X" stumped the celebrity panel of the CBS quiz show I've Got a Secret. His secret: "I invented electronic television." For giving the world the medium broadcasting that very show, the producers handed Philo T. Farnsworth $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes. The true father of the screen had been swallowed whole by history.

This episode follows the 14-year-old Idaho farm boy who saw the architecture of the modern screen in the parallel rows of a plowed potato field, sketched the math across his chemistry teacher's blackboards, and built the device in a San Francisco garage. It covers the brutal patent war with RCA, won in court partly thanks to that teacher's testimony, the financial ruin that followed anyway, and the night in 1969 when watching Neil Armstrong's step made him tell his wife it had all been worthwhile.

• The ranch with a generator: a teenage scavenger who automated his mother's washing machine
• Why spinning discs were doomed: the mechanical bottleneck a potato field solved with electrons
• Blackboards as evidence: the chemistry teacher whose 1922 sketches beat RCA in court
• Winning the patent, losing the fortune: how a corporate monopoly outlasted a lone inventor
• "This has made it all worthwhile": the moon landing, the Emmy award in his name, and the statue that came down