By the time Farnsworth was fifteen, he had developed a theory for the electronic transmission of pictures. He had seen a description in a magazine of an early television that used a crude rotating disc as a scanner, but found it to be too clumsy. Farnsworth instead believed that only electricity could move fast enough to be effective in rendering pictures. His idea was comparable to an electrified pointillist painting. Just as Georges Seurat used hundreds of tiny colored dots to form images, Farnsworth used electrons diffused over a screen. He believed that by controlling the speed and direction of the electrons he could transform electricity into pictures. As he set out to discover the secrets of the electron, the television tube evolved.