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John Logie Baird
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John Logie Baird (August 13, 1888 – June 14, 1946) was a Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system. Although Baird's electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems (such as those of Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth), his early successes demonstrating working television broadcasts and his colour and cinema television work earn him a prominent place in television's invention.
Baird was born in Helensburgh, Argyll, Scotland.
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John Logie Baird (August 13, 1888 – June 14, 1946) was a Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system. Although Baird's electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems (such as those of Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth), his early successes demonstrating working television broadcasts and his colour and cinema television work earn him a prominent place in television's invention.
Baird was born in Helensburgh, Argyll, Scotland. He was educated at Larchfield Academy (now part of Lomond School), Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College (which later became the University of Strathclyde); and the University of Glasgow. His degree course was interrupted by World War I and he never returned to graduate.
Television experiments
Although the development of television was the result of work by many inventors, Baird was its foremost pioneer and made major advances in the field. He is credited with being the first person to produce a live, moving, duotone (or "greyscale") television image from reflected light. Baird achieved this, where other inventors had failed, by obtaining a better photoelectric cell and improving the signal conditioning from the photocell and the video amplifier.
In his first attempts to develop a working television system, Baird experimented with the Nipkow disk, and in February 1924 demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images in his London laboratory. Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television at Selfridges department store in London in a three-week series of demonstrations beginning on March 25, 1925.
In his laboratory on October 2, 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second. Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.
First public demonstrations
On January 26, 1926 Baird repeated the transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. By this time he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the world's first demonstration of a true television system, one that could broadcast live moving images with tone graduation.
He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on July 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary colour; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television. In 1932, he was the first to demonstrate ultra-short wave transmission.
Broadcasting
In 1927, Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over of telephone line between London and Glasgow; Baird transmitted the world's first long-distance television pictures to the Central Hotel at Glasgow Central Station. He then set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and the first television programme for the BBC. In November 1929, Baird and Bernard Natan established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. He televised the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby in 1931. He demonstrated a theatre television system, with a screen two feet by five feet (60 cm by 150 cm), in 1930 at the London Coliseum, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. By 1939 he had improved his theatre projection system to televise a boxing match on a screen by 12 ft (4.6 m by 3.7 m).
From 1929 to 1932, the BBC transmitters were used to broadcast television programmes using the 30-line Baird system, and from 1932-35, the BBC also produced the programmes in their own studio at 16 Portland Place. In November 1936, the BBC began alternating Baird 240-line transmissions with EMI's electronic scanning system which had recently been improved to 405-lines after a merger with Marconi. The Baird system at the time involved an intermediate film process, where footage was shot on cinefilm which was rapidly developed and scanned. The BBC ceased broadcasts with the Baird system in February 1937, due in large part to the lack of mobility of the Baird system's cameras, with their developer tanks, hoses, and cables.
Baird's television systems were replaced by the electronic television system developed by the newly-formed company EMI-Marconi under Isaac Shoenberg, which had access to patents developed by Vladimir Zworykin and RCA. Similarly, Philo T. Farnsworth's electronic "Image Dissector" camera was available to Baird's company via a patent-sharing agreement. However, the Image Dissector camera was found to be lacking in light sensitivity, requiring excessive levels of illumination. Baird's used the Farnsworth tubes instead to scan cinefilm, in which capacity they proved serviceable through prone to dropouts and other problems. Farnsworth himself came to London to Baird's Crystal Palace laboratories in 1936, but was unable to fully solve the problem; the fire that burned the Palace to the ground later that year further hampered the Baird company's ability to compete.
Baird made many contributions to the field of electronic television after mechanical systems had taken a back seat. In 1939, he showed colour television using a cathode ray tube in front of which revolved a disc fitted with colour filters, a method taken up by CBS and RCA in the United States. In 1941 He patented and demonstrated a system of three dimensional television at a definition of 500 lines. On 16 August 1944 he gave the world's first demonstration of a fully electronic colour television display. His 600-line colour system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture. In 1943, the Hankey Committee was appointed to oversee the resumption of television broadcasts after the war. Baird persuaded them to make plans to adopt his proposed 1000-line Telechrome electronic colour system as the new post-war broadcast standard. The picture quality on this system would have been comparable to today's HDTV. The Hankey Committee's plan lost all momentum partly due to the challenges of postwar reconstruction. The monochrome 405-line standard remained in place until 1985 in some areas, and it was three decades until the introduction of the 625-line system in 1964 and (PAL) colour in 1967. A demonstration of large screen three-dimensional television by the B.B.C. was reported in March 2008, over 60 years after Baird's demonstration.
Other inventions
Some of Baird's early inventions were not fully successful. In his twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow's electricity supply. Later Baird perfected a glass razor which was rust-resistant, but shattered. Inspired by pneumatic tyres he attempted to make pneumatic shoes, but his prototype contained semi-inflated balloons which burst. He also invented a thermal undersock (the Baird undersock), which was moderately successful. Baird suffered from cold feet, and after a number of trials, he found that an extra layer of cotton inside the sock provided warmth.
Baird's numerous other developments demonstrated his particular talent at invention. He was a visionary and began to dabble with electricity. In 1928, he developed an early video recording device, which he dubbed Phonovision. The system consisted of a large Nipkow disk attached by a mechanical linkage to a conventional 78-rpm record-cutting lathe. The result was a disc that could record and play back a 30-line video signal. Technical difficulties with the system prevented its further development, but some of the original phonodiscs have been preserved, and have since been restored by Donald McLean, a Scottish electrical engineer. His other developments were in fibre-optics, radio direction finding, infrared night viewing and radar. There is discussion about his exact contribution to the development of radar, for his wartime defence projects have never been officially acknowledged by the British government. According to Malcolm Baird, his son, what is known is that in 1926 Baird filed a patent for a device that formed images from reflected radio waves, a device remarkably similar to radar, and that he was in correspondence with the British government at the time. Much of the information regarding Baird's work in this area is just beginning to emerge.
He built what was to become the world's first working television set by purchasing an old hatbox and a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue.
There is a working model of the Baird televisor in the London Science Museum.
Last years
From December 1944 until his death two years later, Baird lived at a house in Station Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, immediately north of the station itself. Baird died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England on 14 June 1946 after a stroke in February of that year. The old house was demolished in 2007 and the new block of flats on the site will be called "Baird Court".
Legacy
TV now spans the globe and is the world's most popular form of entertainment, offering multiple channels covering all sorts of subjects, though it has been suggested that Baird might not have altogether approved.
In the Channel 5 programme Don't Get Me Started, aired on 29 August 2006, presenter Selina Scott complained about the falling standards of British TV with such shows as Big Brother and other "reality" programs. Malcolm Baird said in an interview that had his father known how TV would turn out in sixty years time, he would have dropped it and turned to other inventions.
The Australian Television awards are named the Logies in his honour.
Firefly films has announced that it is in development of a feature film based on the life of John Logie Baird. Producer: Matthew Hobbs, Consulting Producers: Malcolm Baird & Jan Leman, Writer: James W. Mitchell.
See also
Further reading
Books
- Baird, John Logie, Television and Me: The Memoirs of John Logie Baird. Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2004. ISBN 1-84183-063-1
- Kamm, Antony, and Malcolm Baird, John Logie Baird: A Life. Edinburgh: NMS Publishing, 2002. ISBN 1-901663-76-0
- McArthur, Tom, and Peter Waddell, The Secret Life of John Logie Baird. London: Hutchinson, 1986. ISBN 0-09-158720-4.
- McLean, Donald F., Restoring Baird's Image. The Institute of Electrical Engineers, 2000. ISBN 0-85296-795-0.
- Rowland, John, The Television Man: The Story of John Logie Baird. New York: Roy Publishers, 1967.
- Tiltman, Ronald Frank, Baird of Television. New York: Arno Press, 1974. (Reprint of 1933 ed.) ISBN 0-405-06061-0.
Patents
External links
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- - also contains many detailed references to Baird's history
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- , US patent, filed 1926.
- , US patent for Baird's "Noctovision" infrared television system, filed 1927.
- , US patent for Baird's color television system, filed 1929 (in UK, 1928).n]
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