Clan Baird · 1926
Baird's first television demonstration at Frith Street
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.
An age is rarely opened with a thunderclap. More often it is opened in a small back room above a snack-bar in Soho, in the late-January cold of a winter afternoon, by a tall thin man in a grey lab-coat at the end of three years of work he has paid for himself out of an inheritance and a savings-and-loan against the small jam-and-boot-polish factory he ran before the war. The men who climb the wooden stairway behind him have no idea what they are about to see. They have come to be politely sceptical about the latest in a long sequence of inventor-charlatans' demonstrations and they will leave, an hour and twenty minutes later, having seen a thing none of them had quite believed possible.
THE LODGINGS AT HASTINGS
John Logie Baird is thirty-seven winters old in January of 1926. He was born at The Lodge in West Argyle Street, Helensburgh, on the thirteenth of August 1888, fourth child of the Reverend John Baird, the Helensburgh parish minister, and Jessie Inglis. He took the engineering apprenticeship at the Argyll Motor Works in Alexandria, took the BSc in electrical engineering at the Royal Technical College Glasgow (the modern Strathclyde) in 1914, was rejected from war service on the chronic respiratory weakness that had dogged him since boyhood, and spent the war in a Clyde Valley electrical-supply post he resigned from in 1919 to set up the jam-and-boot-polish manufactory at Trinidad. The Trinidad venture failed in eight months. He came home in 1920, set up a small soap business at the Old Kent Road that paid the rent for two years, sold the business at a small profit in 1923, and on the proceeds and a doctor's certificate that he was working too hard moved to the Sussex coast at Hastings to convalesce.
He took two rooms in Linton Crescent at Hastings in early 1923. He had decided, the previous autumn, that the great unsolved problem of late-Victorian electrical engineering was the transmission of moving pictures by wireless, and that he had the engineering training and now the spare time to attempt it. The mathematics had been worked out by Paul Nipkow in Berlin in 1884: a spinning disc with a spiral of small holes that broke any visual scene into a sequence of horizontal lines, transmitted as a varying electrical signal, reconstructed at the other end by an identical spinning disc and a light source whose brightness varied with the signal. No one had yet built a working version. Baird, alone in his Hastings sitting-room with the curtains drawn, built one across the winter of 1923 to 1924 from a tea-tray, a hat-box, a darning-needle, two bicycle lenses, four-by-two-inch lumber, sealing-wax and the parts of an old electric-fan motor.
By the autumn of 1924 he had transmitted a flickering silhouette of a Maltese cross from one Hastings room to another. By the spring of 1925 he had refined the apparatus into a working thirty-line scanner that could resolve the rough outline of the dummy's head he used as test-subject (the ventriloquist's-dummy head he had bought at a Hastings junk-shop and christened Stooky Bill for the Glasgow nickname for plaster of Paris). He had run out of money by the summer of 1925, was discovered in his Hastings lodgings starving and unwashed by the editor of the Wireless World magazine Hugh Pocock who had come down to see what the eccentric inventor had been working on, and was rescued from the Sussex coast by his business backer the Glasgow timber-broker Captain Oliver Hutchinson, who put up the working capital that took the apparatus to London.
THE ROOM ABOVE CROSS'S SNACK-BAR
He took the lease of the two upper-floor rooms at 22 Frith Street in Soho on the corner of Bateman Street in October 1925. The rooms were above a Greek-Cypriot snack-bar run by a Mr Cross, were reached by a narrow wooden stairway from a side-door on Bateman Street, and rented for two pounds ten shillings the week. He moved the Stooky Bill apparatus across from Hastings on the back of a horse-drawn carter's van and re-erected it in the back room. He worked at the apparatus through the late autumn and into the new year, improved the scanning disc, replaced the neon glow-lamp with a more sensitive vacuum tube, and on the morning of the second of October 1925 transmitted the head of Stooky Bill in a recognisable grey-tone image from the back room to the front. He had television.
He sent the invitations out to the Royal Institution in the first week of January 1926. The Royal Institution committee, on the advice of Professor Sir Ambrose Fleming, agreed to send a delegation. The Times agreed to send their science correspondent William Day. The Daily Express, the Morning Post and the Manchester Guardian agreed to send their men. The list of forty names was confirmed by the twenty-fourth of January. Baird and Hutchinson cleaned the Frith Street rooms, repainted the front room, and arranged the wooden chairs in a half-circle around the receiving apparatus. The temperature in the rooms on the morning of the twenty-sixth of January was approximately four degrees Celsius; the Soho central-heating boilers had failed in the cold week and the snack-bar below was struggling to keep the stove lit.
THE AFTERNOON OF THE TWENTY-SIXTH
The first members of the Royal Institution party arrived at the Bateman Street side-door at twenty past three on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of January 1926. They were taken up the wooden stairway in groups of six by Captain Hutchinson and seated in the front room. Baird stood at the apparatus in the back room. The office assistant Daisy Elizabeth Smith, eighteen years old, the daughter of a Soho greengrocer who had taken the typing-and-filing job with Baird the previous October, was at the makeshift dressing-table in the back room arranging the small electric-bulb that was clipped to a stand and that would be the principal illumination of her face for the demonstration. Baird had told her, the night before, that she would be the first human being whose image was transmitted by television. She had agreed on the same morning to allow Baird to demonstrate her head before the alternative test-subjects (the Stooky Bill dummy and the office cat that Baird had also tested with).
Baird began the demonstration at four o'clock. He scanned the Stooky Bill head first to demonstrate the system: the small grey image of the dummy's face appeared on the receiver in the front room, the painted-orange features of the head resolving into a recognisable plaster-of-Paris likeness on the cathode-tube screen. The Royal Institution men leaned forward in the wooden chairs. Then Baird went to the back-room door and asked Daisy to take her place at the dressing-table. She sat down, looked into the lens, and the receiver-room image resolved across the next thirty seconds into a recognisable human face: Daisy Elizabeth Smith of the Soho greengrocer's daughter, eighteen years old, on the cathode tube of the front-room apparatus, the first human face transmitted by television in the history of the world.
The Royal Institution men sat in silence for perhaps thirty seconds. Then Sir Ambrose Fleming, the senior of the party, stood up, walked through to the back room to verify with his own eyes that Daisy was indeed there and was indeed the source of the image, returned to the front room, sat down, took out his fountain pen, and wrote the four-word note on the back of his invitation card that the Royal Institution would later put on display: This is the future. The Times man William Day was taking shorthand notes through the demonstration; he stood up at the close, shook Baird's hand without speaking, and was on the Northern Line back to Printing House Square by half-past five with the copy that would appear on the morning's front page.
AFTER FRITH STREET
The Times of the twenty-seventh of January 1926 carried the report on page eight under the three-line headline TELEVISION: DEMONSTRATION BEFORE THE ROYAL INSTITUTION: MR BAIRD'S APPARATUS. The Daily Express, the Morning Post and the Manchester Guardian carried the same report at varying length. Within the week Baird was the most-publicised inventor in Britain. By March he had been received by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin at Downing Street. By the summer he had signed the contract with the BBC that brought television broadcasting onto the BBC engineering staff schedule.
The first BBC television broadcasts went out on the Baird thirty-line system from the small studio at Long Acre in September 1929. The BBC Television Service moved to a four-hundred-and-five-line definition in November 1936 on the new Marconi-EMI system that displaced Baird's in the commercial market. The medium that had been demonstrated in the Frith Street back room across the late afternoon of the twenty-sixth of January 1926 took over the British evening hours through the 1950s and 1960s, the international Eurovision broadcasts of the late 1950s, the 1969 Apollo moon-landing transmissions, and the modern continuous-broadcast television world of the four hundred satellite-and-streaming channels of the twenty-first century. The plaque on the wall of 22 Frith Street, unveiled by the Royal Television Society in 1951, reads simply: HERE TELEVISION WAS BORN.