John Logie Baird

John Logie Baird: The Man Who Made Distance See

On 2 October 1925, in a rented workshop in Soho, a chronically ill Scotsman finally got a face to appear at the other end of a wire. The face belonged to a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill, scanned into thirty-two lines at five pictures a second, and it was the first television picture with tonal shading ever transmitted. Everything now broadcast to every screen on earth descends from that thirty-two-line dummy.

A Minister's Youngest Son

Baird was born on 13 August 1888 in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, the youngest of four children of the Reverend John Baird, a Church of Scotland minister, and Jessie Morrison Inglis, a niece of the wealthy Inglis shipbuilding family of Glasgow. He was educated at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, then at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, and entered the University of Glasgow, where the First World War interrupted his degree. He never graduated — a fact worth holding on to, given what he went on to build.

His industrial apprenticeships in Glasgow made him a socialist and wrecked his health, two conditions that shaped the rest of his life. He also became an agnostic, which appears not to have strained relations with his father. In 1915 he volunteered for the British Army and was classified unfit for active service; he spent the war on munitions work with the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company.

A Catalogue of Failures

Before television there was a long run of inventions that did not work, and they are instructive rather than embarrassing. He tried to manufacture diamonds by heating graphite. He made a glass razor, which did not rust and did shatter. He designed pneumatic shoes fitted with semi-inflated balloons — a principle later adopted, in a more durable form, for Dr. Martens boots. His one modest success was thermal undersocks, invented because his own feet were permanently cold. He was, in other words, a compulsive tinkerer with a weakness for the physically implausible, working alone and largely without money.

In early 1923, poor health drove him to Hastings, where he eventually rented a workshop in the Queen's Arcade. In July 1924 he took a thousand-volt shock across his hand, escaped with burns, and was asked by his landlord to leave.

Frith Street, 26 January 1926

He moved fast once the principle worked. In February 1924 he showed the Radio Times that semi-mechanical analogue television was possible, transmitting moving silhouettes. On 25 March 1925 he gave a public demonstration of moving silhouettes at Selfridges in London, running three weeks. On 2 October 1925 came Stooky Bill and greyscale. And on 26 January 1926, at 22 Frith Street in Soho, he demonstrated true television to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times — the first demonstration of a system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal gradation.

Getting anyone to take him seriously had been its own struggle. When he turned up at the Daily Express offices to publicise his invention, the news editor is said to have told a colleague: "For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless!"

The Decade of Firsts

The firsts then arrived in a rush. In 1927 he transmitted pictures over 438 miles of telephone line from London to the Central Hotel in Glasgow. On 3 July 1928 he demonstrated the world's first colour transmission, using scanning discs bearing three spirals of colour-filtered apertures. In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company sent the first transatlantic television signal, from London to Hartsdale, New York, proving television could be a global medium and not a parlour trick. In 1929 the BBC transmitted its first official television programmes using his thirty-line system, and he founded France's first television company with Bernard Natan.

On 14 July 1930, The Man with the Flower in His Mouth became the first drama shown on British television. In 1931 the BBC broadcast the Derby, its first live outside broadcast. Between 1926 and 1928 he built "Phonovision," a video recorder that cut thirty-line signals onto disc with a record lathe — an idea decades early and technically beyond him at the time. Alongside all this he worked on fibre-optics, radio direction finding, infrared night viewing and radar; his 1926 patent for forming images from reflected radio waves resembles radar, though experts note his "Noctovision" could not determine range or three-dimensional coordinates.

Losing to the Electron

From 1933 Baird produced and broadcast programmes independently from studios at the Crystal Palace. On 2 November 1936 the BBC began alternating his 240-line transmissions with EMI's fully electronic system at Alexandra Palace, and the contest was effectively over before it started. His intermediate-film process required developer tanks, hoses and cables; the cameras could not move. A fire at the Crystal Palace destroyed his facilities, and in February 1937 the BBC dropped the Baird system in favour of Isaac Shoenberg's electronic scanning at EMI-Marconi.

He did not stop. In 1939 he showed a hybrid colour system using a cathode-ray tube behind a rotating filter disc. In 1940 he began work on "Telechrome," a fully electronic colour tube. In 1941 he patented and demonstrated three-dimensional television at 500-line definition, and became consulting technical adviser to Cable & Wireless. In 1943 he persuaded the Hankey Committee to plan a post-war standard around a 1,000-line Telechrome colour system — a resolution comparable to modern high definition — but post-war reconstruction killed the plan, and Britain kept 405 lines in some areas until 1985. On 16 August 1944 he gave the world's first demonstration of a practical fully electronic colour television display, a 600-line system using triple interlacing.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The quality was not theoretical depth. Baird did not discover the physics of television; the Nipkow disc already existed, and the electronic scanning that ultimately won was other men's work. What he had was an unusual capacity to force a working object out of nothing — no laboratory, no degree, no funding, ruined health — and to keep converting a theoretical possibility into a thing sitting on a bench in Soho that a Times reporter could look at. Between 1925 and 1928 he alone produced greyscale television, long-distance television, colour television and transatlantic television, and between 1940 and 1944 he did it again with electronics, at 600 lines, largely on his own.

The honest counter-case is severe, and he lived through it. His mechanical system was a technological dead end; the BBC abandoned it in 1937 because his cameras could not move, and every television built since descends from the electronic approach he lost to. His radar claims are contested. Many of his other inventions — the glass razor, the graphite diamonds — were simply bad. His Telechrome standard, arguably his best idea, never shipped. He is best understood not as the discoverer of television's principles but as the man who dragged television into existence years before the industry was ready, and then paid for being early.

Legacy

Baird married Margaret Albu in 1931. He suffered a stroke in February 1946 and died on 14 June at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, aged fifty-seven; he is buried beside his parents in Helensburgh. In 1957 he became the only posthumous subject of the British series This Is Your Life. Australia's Logie Awards carry his name. In 2006 the National Library of Scotland ranked him among the ten greatest Scottish scientists; in 2015 he entered the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame; in 2017 the IEEE fixed a bronze plaque to 22 Frith Street; and in 2021 the Royal Mint put him on a fifty-pence coin.