The inventor to this invention is still quite "unknown" and is actually quite subjective.

Farnsworth was a prodigy on electronics goods.  When he was younger than 14, he coaxed his teacher, Justin Tolman to promote him to a higher level of science of electronics.  To prove that he knew far more than expected, he explained the theory of "relativity" so clearly that he was highly praised, and what's more, he came up with the idea of the television!  He was admitted to Brigham Young University when he was 15, with a standard of electronics far beyond all students in the University, although he stopped studying for a few years due to his father's death.  Living with his wife in California at 21, having an amount for his experiments for his television invention.

However, Vladmir Zworykin, PhD, a Russian came up with the same idea at that time.  In 1923, he had the patent for the same type of tube for "transmitting electronic data" as Farnsworth's.  Zworykin's employer, David Sarnoff at RCA refused to pay Farnsworth for his royalty for making this great invention and put him to court.  Although Zworykin got the patent, he could not prove that he was the one who did the invention work.. Farnsworth's teacher, Tolman, who offered encouragement all along verified that his student not only started on it during high school, he also discovered the design pattern for the tube Zworykin now patented to be his, which he called the image Disector.  RCA then finally agreed to pay Farnsworth his royalties.  However, his patents were on their ways to expire.  RCA then grabbed hold of this chance, realizing that without his patents, Farnsworth could not claim to be the inventor.  From then on, Sarnoff and Zworykin are the "inventors" of the television.

What happened to Farnsworth then?

He was in great depression, alcoholically abused, trapped in psychiatric hospitals and was given shock treatments.  He was being asked once in the show "What's My Line", whether he had invented something that caused pain.  "Yes, it's most painful."  was all he said.  Surprisingly, he doesn't permit the existence of television at home.  His only reason was " There's nothing good on it that was worthwhile."

So how does it really work?

The Cathode Ray Tube
Almost all TVs in use today rely on a device known as the cathode ray tube, or CRT, to display their images.  LCDs and plasma displays are sometimes seen, but they are still rare when compared to CRTs. It is even possible to make a television screen out of thousands of ordinary 60-watt light bulbs! You may have seen something like this at an outdoor event like a football game. Let's start with the CRT, however, because CRTs are the most common way of displaying images today.

 

PhosphorA phosphor is any material that, when exposed to radiation, emits visible light. The radiation might be ultraviolet light or a beam of electrons. Any fluorescent color is really a phosphor - fluorescent colors absorb invisible (to us) ultraviolet light and emit visible light at a characteristic color. In a CRT, phosphor coats the inside of the screen. When the electron beam strikes the phosphor, it makes the screen glow. In a black-and-white screen there is one phosphor that glows white when struck. In a color screen there are three phosphors arranged as dots or stripes that emit red, green and blue light. There are also three electron beams to illuminate the three different colors together. There are thousands of different phosphors that have been formulated. They are characterized by their emission color and the length of time emission lasts after they are excited.

The terms anode and cathode are used in electronics as synonyms for positive and negative terminals. For example, you could refer to the positive terminal of a battery as the anode and the negative terminal as the cathode. In a cathode ray tube, the "cathode" is a heated filament (not unlike the filament in a normal light bulb). The heated filament exists in a vacuum created inside a glass "tube." The "ray" is a stream of electrons that naturally pour off a heated cathode into the vacuum. Electrons are negative. The anode is positive, so it attracts the electrons pouring off of the cathode. In a TV's cathode ray tube, the stream of electrons is focused by a focusing anode into a tight beam and then accelerated by an accelerating anode. This tight, high-speed beam of electrons flies through the vacuum in the tube and hits the flat screen at the other end of the tube. This screen is coated with phosphor, which glows when struck by the beam.

As you can see in this drawing, there's not a whole lot to a basic cathode ray tube. There is a cathode and a pair (or more) of anodes. There is the phosphor coated screen. There is a conductive coating inside the tube to soak up the electrons that pile up at the screen-end of the tube. However, you can see in this diagram no way to "steer" the beam -- the beam will always land in a tiny dot right in the center of the screen.