Baird's Television (1926): The First Public Demonstration

On 26 January 1926 the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television, showing live, moving images of human faces to members of the Royal Institution in his small laboratory in Soho, London. The pictures were tiny, dim and flickering, but they had shades of light and dark and could be recognised. The Baird television demonstration is widely regarded as the moment television passed from theory into working reality, even though the mechanical technology behind it would soon be overtaken.

Background: seeing by wire

The idea of sending pictures by electricity was decades old by the 1920s. In 1884 the German student Paul Nipkow patented a scanning disc: a rotating wheel pierced with a spiral of holes that could break an image into a series of lines. Selenium, whose electrical resistance changes with light, offered a way to turn those lines into a signal. What was missing was a sensitive enough light detector and a way to amplify weak signals; the thermionic valve, developed in the 1900s and 1910s, began to solve the second problem.

In 1908 the Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton described an all-electronic television system using cathode-ray tubes, but it could not be built with the technology of the time. Through the early 1920s inventors in several countries, including Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States, worked on mechanical systems that could transmit silhouettes or simple shapes.

Baird’s early experiments

John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, in 1888 and trained as an electrical engineer in Glasgow. Poor health and a series of failed business ventures left him with little money when he moved to Hastings on the south coast of England in 1923. There he built a crude apparatus from improvised materials, including a hatbox, bicycle lamp lenses, darning needles and sealing wax, and began transmitting simple shadow images.

In April 1925 he showed moving silhouettes to shoppers at Selfridges department store in London. The breakthrough came on 2 October 1925 in his new workshop at 22 Frith Street, Soho, when he obtained a clear image with tonal gradation of a ventriloquist’s dummy head known as Stooky Bill. He then fetched William Taynton, an office worker from downstairs, who became the first person to be televised.

What happened on 26 January 1926

Baird invited members of the Royal Institution, Britain’s long-established scientific society, to see his apparatus. On 26 January 1926 around 40 guests, arriving in small groups, climbed to the cramped attic rooms in Frith Street. A reporter from The Times also attended, and the newspaper published a report two days later.

The visitors watched as faces in one room appeared on a receiver in another. The images were about 30 lines deep and were scanned at roughly five pictures per second, so the picture flickered badly and was only a few centimetres across. Yet the observers could see movement and expression: a head turning, a mouth opening. The Times report noted that the image was faint and often blurred but that the transmission of movement was clear. Baird soon increased the frame rate to 12.5 pictures per second, which gave a steadier picture.

How mechanical television worked

Baird’s system relied on spinning Nipkow discs at both ends:

• At the transmitter, the subject was lit by intense light, and a rotating disc swept a series of narrow strips across the scene, one after another. A photoelectric cell measured the brightness of each point and converted it into a varying electrical current.
• At the receiver, the signal controlled the brightness of a neon lamp viewed through an identical disc spinning in step. The eye blended the rapid sequence of lines into a single moving picture.

The difficulty was keeping the two discs synchronised and getting enough light into the photocells. Early subjects had to sit under blazing lamps, which was one reason Baird used a dummy for testing.

Rapid progress and the BBC

Baird moved quickly to publicise his work. In 1927 he sent television signals by telephone line from London to Glasgow, a distance of more than 400 miles. In February 1928 his company transmitted images across the Atlantic from London to Hartsdale, New York, by shortwave radio, and he also demonstrated early colour and stereoscopic television. He even recorded images on gramophone discs, a system he called Phonovision.

From 30 September 1929 the BBC began experimental broadcasts using Baird’s 30-line system, and in 1932 it took over the programmes itself. A few thousand enthusiasts bought or built Baird “Televisor” receivers, which showed a small orange-pink image through a lens.

The race with electronic television

Mechanical scanning had an inherent limit: to get more detail, discs needed more holes and had to spin faster, which quickly became impractical. Meanwhile inventors were developing fully electronic systems. In the United States, Philo Farnsworth transmitted his first electronic image with his “image dissector” camera tube in September 1927, and Vladimir Zworykin at RCA developed the iconoscope camera tube. In Britain, a team at EMI led by Isaac Shoenberg, working with Marconi, created a high-definition electronic system.

When the BBC opened its regular high-definition Television Service at Alexandra Palace in London on 2 November 1936, it alternated between two systems: Baird’s improved 240-line mechanical-electronic hybrid and Marconi-EMI’s all-electronic 405-line system. The electronic system proved clearly superior, and in February 1937 the BBC dropped Baird’s system. A fire at the Crystal Palace in November 1936, where Baird had laboratories, added to his company’s setbacks.

Key people

• John Logie Baird (1888–1946): inventor of the first working television system; he continued experiments in colour and high-definition television until his death in Bexhill-on-Sea.
• Paul Nipkow (1860–1940): the German inventor whose 1884 scanning disc underpinned mechanical television.
• Philo Farnsworth (1906–1971): American inventor of the image dissector and an early pioneer of electronic television.
• Vladimir Zworykin (1888–1982): Russian-born American engineer at RCA who developed the iconoscope camera tube.

Legacy

Baird’s mechanical television was a technological dead end, but his demonstration proved that live moving pictures could be sent electrically and caught the public imagination. His tireless publicity helped persuade investors, the press and the BBC that television had a future, and Britain launched the world’s first regular high-definition public television service in 1936.

Baird’s work belongs to a wider chain of electrical communication that runs from Bell’s telephone to Marconi’s transatlantic radio signal. Television’s audience grew enormously after the Second World War, and by 1969 hundreds of millions watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing live. A blue plaque at 22 Frith Street, above a café in Soho, now marks the site of the 1926 demonstration.

Timeline

• 1884: Paul Nipkow patents his scanning disc in Germany.
• 1923: Baird begins television experiments in Hastings.
• 1925, April: Baird shows moving silhouettes at Selfridges, London.
• 1925, 2 October: First clear greyscale image, of the dummy Stooky Bill, in Frith Street.
• 1926, 26 January: Public demonstration to members of the Royal Institution.
• 1928, February: Baird’s company sends television images across the Atlantic.
• 1929, 30 September: BBC experimental broadcasts using Baird’s system begin.
• 1936, 2 November: BBC high-definition service opens at Alexandra Palace.
• 1937, February: BBC abandons Baird’s system in favour of Marconi-EMI’s.

Why it matters

The demonstration of 26 January 1926 marked the first time a working television system was shown publicly. Although electronic television soon replaced Baird’s spinning discs, his achievement turned an old dream into a practical reality and launched the medium that would dominate mass culture for the rest of the century.