John Logie Baird(1888–1946)

John Logie Baird was born at 121 West Argyle Street in Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde on 13 August 1888, the youngest of four children of the minister of the West Parish Church. He was an inveterate boy inventor: he wired the family house for electric light at thirteen, ran a private telephone exchange to his friends' houses across the street, and at fourteen took a press photograph that ran on the front page of the local paper. He studied at the Royal Technical College and the University of Glasgow and worked through his twenties as a power-station engineer, increasingly preoccupied with the idea of sending pictures by wireless.

In 1922 he moved to Hastings and began building a television apparatus from whatever he could afford: a wooden tea-chest, a biscuit tin for the lamphousing, darning needles, sealing wax, a hatbox and a scanning disk cut from cardboard. Out of that improvised workshop, moved to 22 Frith Street in Soho, he produced in October 1925 the first recognisable transmitted human image, a ventriloquist's dummy he called Stooky Bill, and then an office boy, William Taynton, the first human face ever televised.

On the afternoon of 26 January 1926, in two attic rooms at 22 Frith Street, Baird demonstrated his system to forty members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. The image was small and flickering, but it was unmistakably a moving human face, and it was the first demonstration of working television to a scientific audience in any country. He was thirty-seven.

The firsts came in quick succession. Within two years Baird had transmitted moving pictures across the Atlantic to a receiver in New York (9 February 1928), demonstrated colour television (3 July 1928), and demonstrated stereoscopic television. The BBC began experimental television broadcasts using his system from a transmitter at Brookmans Park on 30 September 1929, the first television service of its kind in the world. He went on developing the medium for the rest of his life: large-screen television by 1938, a colour receiver by 1944, and fully electronic colour by 1945.

He died at Bexhill-on-Sea on 14 June 1946 and is buried with his parents at Helensburgh. Every electronic television system that followed traces its origin to the demonstration at Frith Street on the afternoon of 26 January 1926, the moment a Scottish engineer first proved to the world that pictures could be sent through the air. The Royal Television Society's highest honour is the John Logie Baird Award, and the Hastings flat where he built the first set is marked by a plaque.