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 Reverend John Baird, minister of the West Parish Church, and Jessie Inglis, a shipbuilder's daughter from Glasgow. He was a sickly child with chronic bronchitis and a habit of taking apparatus apart on the kitchen table. He wired the family house for electric light from an accumulator battery at thirteen, installed a telephone exchange between his bedroom and his friends' bedrooms across the street, and at fourteen took a portrait photograph of his sister Annie that ran on the front page of the Helensburgh and Gareloch Times. He went up to the Royal Technical College in Glasgow in 1906 and to the University of Glasgow in 1914, but bronchitis and the outbreak of war broke his degree, and he spent the years from 1915 to 1922 as a power-station engineer for the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company in Rutherglen, increasingly unwell, increasingly preoccupied with the idea of sending pictures by wireless.

In 1922 he gave up the power-station work and moved to Hastings on the south coast for his health, took rooms above a flower shop at 21 Linton Crescent, and began building a television apparatus from the materials he could afford. The first set was a wooden tea-chest, a tin biscuit box for the lamphousing, four needles, sealing wax, a discarded hatbox, a Nipkow scanning disk cut from cardboard, and a torch bulb. He nearly killed himself in February 1923 attempting to rectify a two-thousand-volt power supply on the kitchen table; the landlady asked him to leave. He moved to 22 Frith Street in Soho, where in October 1925 he produced the first recognisable transmitted human image, a ventriloquist's dummy he had named Stooky Bill, and then a fifteen-year-old office boy named William Taynton who was 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 thirty lines, five frames a second, the size of a postage stamp, in flickering pinkish monochrome, and it was unmistakably a moving human face. It was the first demonstration of working television to a scientific audience in any country. He was thirty-seven. The Times the next morning carried the news in a column inch on page sixteen. Within twenty months Baird had transmitted moving pictures by wireless to a receiver in New York (the first transatlantic television, 9 February 1928), demonstrated colour television (3 July 1928), and demonstrated stereoscopic television.

The BBC began experimental thirty-line television broadcasts using Baird's system from a transmitter at Brookmans Park on 30 September 1929. For the next six years the Baird Company and the rival Marconi-EMI consortium fought the engineering competition that would decide which system would carry the world's first regular high-definition public television service. The competition was conducted from August to December 1936 at Alexandra Palace in north London. The Baird mechanical system was beaten by the Marconi-EMI all-electronic system on every quantitative measure: resolution, brightness, flicker, range. The BBC formally dropped Baird from the service in February 1937. He took it without public bitterness and went on working on improvements: large-screen television by 1938, the first colour television receiver by 1944, full electronic colour by 1945. His health was failing; his Crystal Palace laboratory had burned in 1936 taking ten years of records; the wartime ban on television broadcasting had stopped his commercial recovery.

He died at his home at Bexhill-on-Sea on 14 June 1946, of a stroke, aged fifty-seven, eight days after the BBC resumed television broadcasts. He is buried with his parents at Helensburgh cemetery. The Baird name today carries the lasting weight of being the surname of the man who first showed the world that pictures could be sent through the air. The system he built was technically superseded almost as soon as it was perfected, but every electronic television system that followed traces its origin to the demonstration at Frith Street on the afternoon of 26 January 1926. The Baird flat at 21 Linton Crescent in Hastings is marked by a plaque. The Royal Television Society's highest honour is the John Logie Baird Award.