First television demonstration

The man and his machine

John Logie Baird was born on 13 August 1888 in Helensburgh, on the Clyde, the youngest of four children of a Church of Scotland minister. A frail man who never finished his engineering degree, he came to television through stubborn improvisation rather than institutional backing. Working in Hastings on the south coast of England, he built the world's first working television set with improbable materials: an old hatbox, darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, sealing wax and glue. In July 1924 he took a 1,000-volt shock that burned his hand and nearly ended the project before it began.

His starting point was a much older idea. In 1884 the German engineer Paul Nipkow had patented a scanning system built around a spinning disk full of holes, each hole slicing one line of an image in turn. Nipkow never turned his patent into a working product, but Baird built on it, adding lenses and a photoelectric cell that turned shifting light into an electrical signal.

The 1926 demonstration

In February 1924 Baird had shown the Radio Times that he could transmit moving silhouettes, and in March 1925 he took his machine to the Selfridges department store in London, where shoppers watched shadowy forms for three weeks. By his own later definition, printed in December 1926, this was not yet true television, because it lacked the gradations of light, shade and detail that make an image look real. The machine he used at Selfridges had only 16 holes, and Baird did not count it as real television.

The account he wanted came on 26 January 1926. Members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times gathered at his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho, where the demonstration ran at an initial five pictures per second, later improved to 12.5. The system showed a small but clearly defined image of a ventriloquist's dummy's face, and then a human subject, moving and speaking on a screen as the audience watched. The receiving apparatus used two Nipkow disks of 30 holes, and a neon gas discharge lamp whose brightness was modulated by the incoming signal, reconstructed on a ground glass plate. The earliest screens showed an image barely wider than an inch and a half.

What it set in motion

The 1926 demonstration turned Baird into a broadcaster. In 1927 his equipment relayed Britain's first long-distance television pictures, sent over some 438 miles of telephone line from London to a hotel in Glasgow. In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company made the first transatlantic transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and in the same year Baird demonstrated colour and stereoscopic television. On 14 July 1930 the BBC broadcast a play called The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, the first drama shown on British television, and in 1931 Baird televised The Derby, the first live outside broadcast watched by the public.

From 1929 the BBC carried the Baird 30-line system for its early broadcasts, and the first commercial televisor receivers were assembled from kits and sold to the public. Britain, and parts of Europe, took to mechanical television for a few intense years before something better arrived.

The machine that lost

Baird's electromechanical approach had a ceiling. On 2 November 1936 the BBC began regular high-definition broadcasts from Alexandra Palace, alternating between Baird's 240-line system and the all-electronic Marconi-EMI system, which offered a 405-line picture. The outcome was settled quickly: the BBC dropped Baird's system in early 1937, and the electronic cathode-ray picture tube won out. Baird continued experimenting, and worked on electronic colour television until his death in 1946.

His place in history is secure. In 2006 the National Library of Scotland named him one of the ten greatest Scottish scientists, and in 2017 the IEEE chose the 26 January 1926 demonstration, rather than the earlier Selfridges showings, as the moment to mark with an engineering Milestone. A street plaque at 22 Frith Street now stands on the spot, and in 2021 the Royal Mint issued a 50 pence coin in his honour. What the visitors saw that evening, a small flickering image, was the opening of an industry that now reaches every corner of the world.