John Logie Baird,
August 13th, 1888
In 2006, John Logie Baird was voted by the good people of Scotland, home of shortbread, heroin and offal, as one of their 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history.
Now, to the innocent mind that might not sound like much of a club. But let me tell you! Other luminaries of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history included James Watt, who invented you having to go to fucking work for a living, the bastard. Or Lord Kelvin, who invented being cold and the existence of the entire fucking universe via thermodynamics, Alexander Fleming, who invented not dying, John Napier who invented annoying mathematics, Alexander Graham Bell, who invented people talking to you when you didn’t want them to, and Robert Watson-Watt who invented knowing where the fucking Nazis are.
John Logie Baird was born on 13 August 1888 in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the youngest of four children of the Reverend John Baird, a Church of Scotland minister and Jessie Morrison Inglis, the niece of the wealthy Inglis family of shipbuilders from Glasgow. He was educated at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College and the University of Glasgow and whilst there, he undertook a series of apprenticeships as an engineer. Glasgow’s fervent socialist scene made an impression on him and his health, and he became a dedicated socialist and atheist (which his dad didn’t seem too bothered about). He also became quite persistently ill.
The arrival of World War One put paid to his academic career and he never went back to it and although he volunteered in 1915, the British Army had no need of a wheezing Scotsman who looked like he should have been in some 1980s Indie band, writing songs about Elvis Presley’s trousers.
Baird had always been an inventive sort of chap, from setting up a telephone exchange to connect his house to those of his friends nearby at a young age, to inventing a waterproof sock lining and pneumatic shoes filled with balloons which worked fine until the balloons burst. He also tried to make diamonds by heating graphite and so invented really hot graphite and a glass razor which was sharp as fuck and never went rusty, but shattered if you dropped it. Not of all his inventions were particularly successful, although the balloon shoes were developed into ‘air soles’ by Dr Martin boots who made them so skinheads could stomp people’s heads in relative comfort. His waterproof sock was also a moderate success.
Buoyed with this limitless ineptitude, the pallid Baird set sail for somewhere where the rain would actually stop for a change and found himself in Trinidad. Keen to exploit the local abundance of fruit and sugar, he started a jam factory, failing to account for the equal abundance of insect wildlife that then ate all the sugar. Although he did capture a giant locust which he kept in a glass jar and fed on whisky. You can take the boy out of Scotland, but you can’t take the Scotland out of the slightly mad, drunk bloke.
But it was in Trinidad that he supposedly began to work, surrounded by shitfaced giant locusts and a massive, rapidly diminishing sugar mountain, on the thing that he had first become interested in after he read a German book on the photoelectric properties of selenium, as you do, in 1903.
Television.
That he began to experiment in Trinidad with television is a great example of opportune local journalism, desperately trying to find a local angle on a worldwide event. A long tradition going back to the time, in 1837, when the Sandringham Advertiser proudly greeted the coronation of Queen Victoria with the headline ‘Local Girl Becomes Ruler of the Known World’. That didn’t happen, either, but….
In the end, however, Baird was done with his Trinidadian jam adventure and with his pockets stuffed full of jars of low sugar, high insect content, tasteless fruit pulp, he arrived back in the UK.
There’s nowhere in the UK where it is either currently raining or about to start raining, the sickly Baird moved as far from the rain as he could and moved to 21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, on the south coast of England. It was in Hastings that he built the world’s first ever working television set from items that included a ladies’ hat box, some needles, a pair of scissors, some bicycle lights, glue and a tea chest. In February 1924, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images and shortly after nearly blew himself to shit with a 1000-volt electric shock. He survived with a burnt hand. The landlord of his workshop politely suggested that he might find somewhere else to set fire to himself.
Undeterred, he arrived at 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 his laboratory on the 2nd of October 1925, he 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. And it wasn’t even remotely disturbing.
Excited by this, he ran downstairs and fetched 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, from a well in the cellar where he forced him to regularly rub the lotion on its skin or else it got the hose again. Well, he got him from the office downstairs, but Baird was a bit creepy, right?
Taynton became the first person to be televised in full tonal rage.
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. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation and the subject was Baird's business partner, Oliver Hutchinson.
Baird set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928, made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and in 1929 the first television programmes officially transmitted by the BBC. He also demonstrated television in colour, and developed a video recording system which he called 'phonovision'. In 1930 the Baird company brought out the world's first mass produced television set, called 'The Televisor'.
The BBC began using his system for the first public television service in 1932, before switching in 1937 to the cheaper and easier to use Marconi-EMI version.
Lots of people were responsible for various elements of the invention of television, but what Baird did is put them all together, electrocute the fuck out himself, make a machine from parts he found under the stairs and made it work and in inventing terms, first is everything, second is nowhere. He stood on the shoulders of giants, for certain, but whilst he was up there, he took a TV with him and put on a show.
He also did some pioneering work in fibre-optics, infra-red night visions, radio direction finding and, maybe, radar. What his work with radar was exactly, if it was anything at all, isn’t known because whatever he did, he did in WWII and in the strictest confidentiality and nobody either knew or is not telling. In 1941, he patented and demonstrated a system of 3D television. On 16th August 1944, he gave the world's first demonstration of a practical fully electronic colour television.
At the age of 43, John Logie Baird married South African pianist Margaret Albu in New York. The couple had two children; Diana and Malcolm.
His company, Baird Television Ltd., had been wound up soon after the war started in 1939 and since then he had been privately funding all his research. He suffered a heart attack in 1941 and moved, again for his health, back to the south coast in 1944. He died on Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, on 14 June 1946 after suffering a stroke in February of that year.
I’ve only given you a brief insight into a man who led a tremendously entertaining life and was a wonderful example of the gentleman genius inventor, part lunatic, part failure, part innovator and thoroughly good bloke. If you can track down a copy of Television and Me—the Memoirs of John Logie Baird, edited by his son Malcolm, I heartily recommend it.
Baird, Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin all independently developed the technology that made television what it now is in the early 20th century, so they are all its "father".