Tucked away in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighbourhood is the museum that the city forgot.

But it’s also one of the most significant — at least, if you think the invention of television is important.

The tiny space devoted to Moses Znaimer’s MZTV Museum of Television in the Zoomerplex facility on Jefferson Ave. houses everything from the world’s most valuable TV to Marilyn Monroe’s own portable black-and-white box.

And until April, it is showcasing the world debut of Forgotten Genius: The Boy Who Invented Electronic TV. A Canadian museum is the first to mount one of the most significant television exhibits in North America: Philo Farnsworth, the titular genius, is the man who created the hardware that allows you to watch as much Masterpiece Theatre or The Big Bang Theory as your heart desires.

The late Farnsworth won the patent for electronic television as we know it today — an invention as significant as the printing press. But the intervention of a world war and corporate espionage uprooted the legacy of a man whose invention let images be beamed into homes worldwide.

“There are so many dramatic moments in his life — you can’t make this up,” says curator and film historian Phil Savenick in an interview from Los Angeles. “He was a genius who never finished high school. He was a kid plowing the field and sees the possibility of electrons being aligned in the mud. RCA tries to steal his idea. The Nazis licensed his system to broadcast the Olympics. His technology was used for the first moon landing. His impact was huge.”

A documentary maker nominated three times for Emmy Awards, Savenick has produced films before about the making of culture, with titles like Disney Through the Decades, 50 Years of NBC Late Night and The Making of Some Like It Hot. But Philo Farnsworth has been his passion project.

“You need one person to care. One angel to say this wasn’t right. Many of us in the industry would have no career without this guy. Let’s spend a little time and energy to honour him.”

Farnsworth’s story is worthy of a major film treatment — and some have tried, including The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin, who wrote a stage play, adapted from his screenplay, about the battle between the young inventor and David Sarnoff, the president of RCA. At the heart of the story — which had been picked up by New Line Cinema, but never produced for the screen — was the war over who created the 20th century’s most influential invention.

Farnsworth never profited from his work as his patent ran out after the war. But it’s a remarkable tale of a 14-year-old youth who in 1922 Utah, while working his family’s potato field, wondering if electrons could be made to follow the same pattern to create moving images. That moment “was ground zero for all electronic communication leading up to the iPhone,” says Savenick.

A piece of that historic plow is now part of the collection at MZTV.

Much of the exhibit is from Farnsworth’s personal collection, including the inventor’s own television set, which Savenick gained access to after meeting the inventor’s family and his widow, Pem Farnsworth.

“It’s the first time this stuff has been seen. It’s been hiding in a basement for half a century,” says Savenick. “There are pieces of Farnsworth’s legacy in major museums, including the Smithsonian. But the greatest exhibit in the world is in Toronto.”

For Toronto to be housing the Farnsworth collection is the television geek equivalent of having King Tut’s Tomb — and a couple Gutenberg bibles, without the lineups. On a Friday that the Star visited there was no one in the museum, which has limited hours.

“MZTV is a small place, but it’s a legendary place to television collectors and historians. It houses the world’s rarest, most significant and valuable TVs,” says Savenick. “It’s a little thing But it’s a world famous little thing.”

There is of course, The Paley Center For Media in New York, The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, and the National Science and Media Museum in the U.K.

But unlike those large, financially endowed museums, which largely focus on the “software” or programming, MZTV looks at the hardware: the technology that created the medium.

MZTV is like the Bata Shoe Museum, another local boutique institution fuelled by the unique passion and collection of its creators. In this case, Moses Znaimer the co-founder of Citytv, a widely copied urban concept aimed at younger audiences that deconstructed our traditional notions of what television should be. (It has since purchased by Rogers Media.) Znaimer now heads ZoomerMedia Ltd., a collection of broadcast and digital properties that concentrate on the 45-plus market.

“Moses immediately saw the value in all this,” says Savenick. “And having Philo’s belongings from the father of television in the same museum that houses all those valuable early sets makes perfect sense.”

Not everyone sees early TV sets as works of art. But Znaimer’s collection of retro-futuristic Philco Predicta sets, for example, rank with the greatest works of industrial art.

“Television is so ubiquitous that we don’t treat it like the family silverware, more like the family toaster,” Znaimer said as his reasons for creating the museum. “Television history was being lost.”

Savenick, meanwhile, is looking at the long game. In 2027 it will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of television. He wants to make sure everyone knows who Philo Farnsworth is by then.

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He is currently at work on his own screenplay on the man.

“It’s a way to honour what this remarkable kid did. The way that people have approached it before is to see Farnsworth as this tragic figure, a David and Goliath story about fighting industrial titans, and fortune and money. That’s part of the story,” says Savenick.

“But the heart of all this to me is this kid who goes off to invent TV. It’s this wild idea that manifested itself in the real world and changed lives. And we’re starting the ball rolling in Toronto.”