John Logie Baird

Paul Gottlieb Nipkow had invented this scanning system in 1884.

Television historian Albert Abramson calls Nipkow's patent "the master television patent".

Nipkow's work is important because Baird, followed by many others, chose to develop it into a broadcast medium.

John Logie Baird (13 August 1888 – 14 June 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926.

He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.

Baird was born on 13 August 1888 in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, and was the youngest of four children of the Reverend John Baird, the Church of Scotland's minister for the local St Bride's Church, and Jessie Morrison Inglis, the orphaned niece of the wealthy Inglis family of shipbuilders from Glasgow.

He was educated at Larchfield Academy (now part of Lomond School) in Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College; and the University of Glasgow.

While at college, Baird undertook a series of engineering apprentice jobs as part of his course.

The conditions in industrial Glasgow at the time helped form his socialist convictions but also contributed to his ill health.

He became an agnostic, though this did not strain his relationship with his father.

His degree course was interrupted by the First World War and he never returned to graduate.

At the beginning of 1915 he volunteered for service in the British Army but was classified as unfit for active duty.

Unable to go to the front, he took a job with the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company, which was engaged in munitions work.

In early 1923, and in poor health, Baird moved to 21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, on the south coast of England.

He later rented a workshop in the Queen's Arcade in the town.

Baird built what was to become the world's first working television set using items that included 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 that he purchased.

In February 1924, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images.

In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock but survived with only a burnt hand but, as a result, his landlord, Mr Tree, asked him to vacate the premises.

Soon after arriving in London, looking for publicity, Baird visited the Daily Express newspaper to promote his invention.

The news editor was terrified and he was quoted by one of his staff as saying: "For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him—he may have a razor on him."

In these attempts to develop a working television system, Baird experimented using the Nipkow disk.

In June 1924, Baird had bought from Cyril Frank Elwell a thallium sulphide (Thalofide) cell, developed by Theodore Case in the USA.

The Thalofide cell was part of the important new technology of 'talking pictures'.

Baird's pioneering implementation of this cell allowed Baird to become the first person to produce a live, moving, greyscale television image from reflected light.

Baird achieved this, where other inventors had failed, by applying two unique methods to the Case cell.

He accomplished this by improving the signal conditioning from the cell, through temperature optimisation (cooling) and his own custom-designed video amplifier.

In his laboratory on 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" in a 32-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.

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 25 March 1925.

On 26 January 1926, Baird gave the first public demonstration of true television images 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, where Bar Italia is now located.

Baird initially used a scan rate of 5 pictures per second, improving this to 12.5 pictures per second c.1927.

It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation.

In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission.

Baird's early technological successes and his role in the practical introduction of broadcast television for home entertainment have earned him a prominent place in television's history.

He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on 3 July 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 2006, Baird was named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history, having been listed in the National Library of Scotland's 'Scottish Science Hall of Fame'.

In 2015 he was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.

In 2017, IEEE unveiled a bronze street plaque at 22 Frith Street (Bar Italia), London, dedicated to Baird and the invention of television.

In 2021, the Royal Mint unveiled a John Logie Baird 50p coin commemorating the 75th anniversary of his death.