Television
John Logie Baird (August 13, 1888 – June 14, 1946)
John Logie Baird was a Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system. Although Baird's electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems (such as those of Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth), his early successes demonstrating working television broadcasts and his colour and cinema television work earn him a prominent place in television's invention.
Baird was born in Helensburgh, Argyll, Scotland. He was educated at Larchfield Academy (now part of Lomond School), Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College (which later became the University of Strathclyde); and the University of Glasgow. His degree course was interrupted by World War I and he never returned to graduate.
In his laboratory on 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second. Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.
John Logie Baird decribing how his television works
Television experiments
Although the development of television was the result of work by many inventors, Baird is one of its foremost pioneers and made major advances in the field. He is generally credited with being the first person to produce a live, moving, duotone (or "greyscale") television image from reflected light. Baird achieved this, where other inventors had failed, by obtaining a better photoelectric cell and improving the signal conditioning from the photocell and the video amplifier.
In his first attempts to develop a working television system, Baird experimented with the Nipkow disk, and in February 1924 demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images, such as his fingers wiggling, in his London laboratory. Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television at Selfridges department store in London in a three-week series of demonstrations beginning on March 25, 1925.
First public demonstrations
On January 26, 1926 Baird repeated the transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. By this time he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the world's first demonstration of a true television system, one that could broadcast live moving images with tone graduation.
He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on July 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary colour; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television. In 1932, he was the first to demonstrate ultra-short wave transmission.
Broadcasting
In 1927, Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow; Baird transmitted the world's first long-distance television pictures to the Central Hotel at Glasgow Central Station. He then set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and the first television programme for the BBC. In November 1929, Baird and Bernard Natan established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. He televised the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby in 1931. He demonstrated a theatre television system, with a screen two feet by five feet (60 cm by 150 cm), in 1930 at the London Coliseum, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. By 1939 he had improved his theatre projection system to televise a boxing match on a screen 15 ft (4.6 m) by 12 ft (4.6 m by 3.7 m).
From 1929 to 1932, the BBC transmitters were used to broadcast television programmes using the 30-line Baird system, and from 1932-35, the BBC also produced the programmes in their own studio at 16 Portland Place. In November 1936, the BBC began alternating Baird 240-line transmissions with EMI's electronic scanning system which had recently been improved to 405-lines after a merger with Marconi. The BBC ceased broadcasts with the Baird system in February 1937, due mostly to the immobility of the Baird system's cameras.
Baird's television systems were replaced by the electronic television system developed by the newly-formed company EMI-Marconi under Isaac Shoenberg, which had access to patents developed by Vladimir Zworykin and RCA. Similarly, Philo T. Farnsworth's electronic "Image Dissector" camera was available to Baird's company via a patent-sharing agreement. However, the Image Dissector camera was found to be lacking in light sensitivity, requiring excessive levels of illumination.
Baird made many contributions to the field of electronic television after mechanical systems had taken a back seat. In 1939, he showed colour television using a cathode ray tube in front of which revolved a disc fitted with colour filters, a method taken up by CBS and RCA in the United States. On 16 August 1944 he gave the world's first demonstration of a fully electronic colour television display. His 600-line colour system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture.[6] In 1943, the Hankey Committee was appointed to oversee the resumption of television broadcasts after the war. Baird persuaded them to make plans to adopt his proposed 1000-line Telechrome electronic colour system as the new post-war broadcast standard. The picture quality on this system would have been comparable to today's HDTV. The Hankey Committee's plan lost all momentum partly due to the challenges of postwar reconstruction. The monochrome 405-line standard remained in place until 1985 in some areas, and it was three decades until the introduction of the 625-line system in 1964 and (PAL) colour in 1967.