The first television was built from a hatbox, darning needles and bicycle lenses
In a rented workshop in Hastings, a sickly Scottish engineer cobbled together a working television from an old hatbox, scissors, darning needles, bicycle lamp lenses, a tea chest, sealing wax and glue. When John Logie Baird went looking for publicity in London, a Daily Express editor told staff to get rid of the lunatic in reception.
Baird had moved to the south coast early in 1923 hoping the milder weather would help his poor health. By February 1924 he could send moving silhouettes to show the Radio Times what was possible. That July a 1,000-volt shock burned his hand, and his landlord asked him to leave. The machine relied on a spinning Nipkow disc, a scanning idea patented back in 1884.
The breakthrough came on 2 October 1925. Baird got a 32-line greyscale picture of a ventriloquist's dummy's head, nicknamed Stooky Bill, at five frames a second. Wanting to see a real face, he ran downstairs and fetched 20-year-old office worker William Taynton, who became the first person televised in full tonal range. On 26 January 1926 he showed live moving images with shading to members of the Royal Institution and a Times reporter at 22 Frith Street in Soho, where Bar Italia now stands.
Firsts piled up quickly. In 1927 he sent pictures 438 miles by telephone line from London to Glasgow, answering a 225-mile Bell Labs broadcast of the month before. In 1928 his company sent television across the Atlantic to Hartsdale, New York, and on 3 July he demonstrated colour using discs with three spirals of filtered apertures. The BBC carried his 30-line system from 1929 to 1935 and televised the Derby in 1931.
Mechanical scanning lost the race. From November 1936 the BBC alternated Baird's 240-line system with EMI's all-electronic 405-line one; Baird's cameras, tied to film developing tanks and hoses, could barely move, and a fire at his Crystal Palace facilities helped end his broadcasts in February 1937. He kept inventing, showing a practical all-electronic colour display in 1944 and persuading a postwar committee to plan a 1,000-line colour standard comparable to modern high definition. Postwar reconstruction stalled it, and he died in 1946.
Source: John Logie Baird
