We Americans have loved inventors from the days of Edison on. Sure, we're in the age of "big science," exemplified by collective efforts such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. But we've never lost our fascination with the solitary genius who changes the world in his basement lab.

Early science fiction is full of characters such as "Doc" Cargraves, who in Robert Heinlein's 1947 novel "Rocketship Galileo" builds his own moon rocket. And figures such as the two Steves -- Jobs and Wozniak, both of Apple -- are proof that the age of individual invention has lasted into our own time. After all, Apple Computer was created in a California garage.

But it took the recent Emmy awards to remind me how widespread are the results of another genius' work. A man named Philo T. Farnsworth is claimed by some as the inventor of television, and held a patent to prove it.

The Emmys, you see, were originally called the "Immys." The name derived from the Image Orthicon, a television camera tube credited to the scientist Vladimir Zworykin at RCA. But Farnsworth purists have argued for decades that it was their man's pioneering work that inspired Zworykin's creation. The U.S. Patent Office gave Farnsworth priority, and in 1939 RCA began paying the inventor royalties for the use of his technology.

When the Utah farm boy conceived his idea in 1921, he was breaking up soil with a horse-drawn harrow on his father's farm. The plowed lines of dirt triggered the notion that a picture could be sent electronically by scanning the image one line at a time. Farnsworth would project the first television image in a San Francisco loft about six years later. He was 21.

Sending pictures through the air wasn't a new idea. A German named Paul Nipkow had created a crude technique using perforated spinning disks and mirrors in the 1880s that was picked up by subsequent inventors. But Farnsworth did away with mechanical contrivances to manipulate a beam of electrons inside a vacuum tube.

Farnsworth's victory in his patent battle with Zworykin hinged on just when he had come up with his idea. His high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, would later testify that the 15-year old Farnsworth drew the device on a school blackboard. When Tolman was able to reproduce that sketch in court, the evidence in favor of Farnsworth became overwhelming.

Yet it would be a Pyrrhic victory for the inventor, who ran afoul of an RCA publicity machine that claimed television as its own. Farnsworth had no publicity agent and no public-relations budget. And though RCA's David Sarnoff deserves credit for getting television in front of the public after World War II, it's a shame that so little glory now attaches itself to the name of Philo Farnsworth.

He was a compulsive man, driven by ideas, the holder of 300 patents. His later work ranged from electron microscopy to radar and baby incubators, none of which earned him any more fame than television had. When he appeared on "What's My Line" in 1957, panelists were unable to identify him. The inventor's final work on nuclear fusion failed for lack of funding, and he died in 1971.

In this 75th anniversary of its birth, I expected to see a tribute to Farnsworth on television. Maybe I missed it -- I don't watch much TV. Ironically, neither did Farnsworth.

But not so long ago, Time Magazine named him one of the 20 most important scientists and thinkers of the 20th century. Not bad for a man who, without academic credentials or corporate sponsorship, believed in his own ideas and made them real.