Clan Baird

On the late afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-sixth of January 1926, in the small two-room laboratory above Mr Cross's snack-bar at 22 Frith Street in Soho, the thirty-seven-year-old Helensburgh-born inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in the history of the world. The audience was about forty members of the Royal Institution and the editorial-and-scientific press of London, brought across in evening dress through the narrow Soho streets at four in the afternoon and climbing in turn the steep wooden stairway to the second-floor rooms. Baird's apparatus was a hat-stand frame strung with a Nipkow scanning-disc cut from the bottom of a tea-tray, a neon glow-lamp inside a Pyrex jar, a motor that had been the second-hand purchase of a bicycle-shop dynamo, and several yards of sealing-wax, biscuit-tin metal and string. In the back room the transmitter scanned the face of his ventriloquist's-dummy test-head Stooky Bill, then his office assistant Daisy Elizabeth Smith, and threw the image, line by line, thirty lines a frame, into the receiver in the front room where the gentlemen of the Royal Institution were waiting. The image was small, grey, flickering and recognisably human. The Times man William Day published the report the next morning, twenty-seventh of January 1926, under the headline TELEVISION: DEMONSTRATION BEFORE THE ROYAL INSTITUTION. The British Broadcasting Corporation adopted the Baird system within twenty months and made the first BBC television transmission in September 1929. The medium that became, within a single generation, the dominant single instrument of British public-and-private life was opened that January afternoon above the Soho snack-bar.

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