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Scanning our Past from London
From Telephone to Television
I. I
NTRODUCTION
AlexanderGrahamBell,thesubjectofourprevious“Scan-ning,” hailed from Scotland and emigrated to Canada. An-other “electrical” Scot was John Logie Baird (Fig. 1), thetelevision pioneer, but he moved only as far as the south of England.Baird first attracted public notice when the large depart-ment store, Selfridges, in London’s Oxford Street, arrangeda demonstration of Baird’s television experiments in 1925(Fig. 2). The wealthy storeowner, Gordon Selfridge, likedto have a special attraction for the store’s “Birthday Week.”Selfridge had a friend who lived next door to Baird and wasaware of his experiments, and as a result Baird was invited togive three demonstrations daily for three weeks. A publicityleaflet given to shoppers proclaimed “Television is to lightwhat telephoning is to sound.”The demonstrations attracted a large number of shoppers,which was what Selfridge wanted, and also made a numberof the scientific community aware of the experiments, whichwas what Baird wanted. It also brought much-needed moneyto the struggling inventor.II. B
AIRD
’
S
B
EGINNINGS
Baird was born in 1888 in Helensburgh, where his fatherwas a minister of the Church of Scotland. His mother camefrom a shipbuilding family in Glasgow. Father Baird wantedJohn to follow him as a minister, but John had other ideasand set his heart on an electrical engineering career. He en-rolled at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow and, aftergraduating, worked in a number of engineering firms. At theoutbreak of the First World War in 1914 he wanted to enlist,but was rejected as medically unfit for military service. He joined the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company, whichserved his home area, as an electrical engineer, but had toleave after only a few years because of poor health.Needing to earn a living, Baird tried a number of businessventures. An early one was the Baird Undersock, his owncure for the cold feet from which he suffered. It was not agreat success, but he learned about marketing a product and
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9219(01)07253-X.
Fig. 1.
John Logie Baird at the Ruthergien substation of the ClydeValley Power Company. (Courtesy of the Royal Television Society,London.)
hemovedontosellingjam,honeyandsoap.Hishealth,how-ever, was not up to the traveling involved in making sales toshops, and in 1922 he gave up all these ventures and retiredto Hastings, on the south coast of England.III. T
HE
T
ELEPHONE
 /T
ELEVISION
C
ONNECTION
An early interest of Baird’s had been the telephone andas a teenager he had constructed his own telephone instru-ments. He had also thought about the possibility of televi-sion,andinHastingshedecidedtodevotehimselftoresearchand experiment to create a television system. The most diffi-cult problem facing any aspiring television pioneer was howto scan the scene so that a signal representing the bright-ness of successive points could be obtained, and how to do
0018–9219/01$10.00 © 2001 IEEE
PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 89, NO. 8, AUGUST 2001 1227
 
Fig.2.
BairddemonstratesmechanicalTVatSelfridgesDepartmentStore,inLondon’sOxfordStreetin 1925. (Courtesy of the Royal Television Society, London.)
Fig. 3.
Members of the public line up to see the TV demonstrationat Selfridges Department Store. (Courtesy of the Royal TelevisionSociety, London.)
it so quickly that enough complete images could be trans-mitted every second to give the illusion of moving pictureswithminimalflicker.Bairdsoughtamechanicalsolutionandall his television transmitters and receivers used mechanicalscanning arrangements. The equipment he assembled mayseemverycrudetomoderneyesbut,howevercrudeitsoundsto us, it impressed Baird’s neighbor and then Gordon Self-ridge. The result was that Baird was able to take his demon-strations out of the attic and repeat them in public, and hemoved from Hastings into central London (Fig. 3).Baird needed financial backing, which was soon forth-coming from people who had been impressed by his
Fig. 4.
Original Baird equipment, Long Acre, used for first BBCTV Broadcasts in 1929. (Courtesy of the Royal Television Society,London.)
demonstrations. The Baird Television Development Com-pany was formed in 1927 and that year Baird demonstratedtelevision over the telephone line between London andGlasgow, a distance of almost 500 miles. In the followingyear Baird made the world’s first transatlantic televisiontransmission, between London and New York, and healso made the first television transmission to a ship inmid-Atlantic.
1228 PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 89, NO. 8, AUGUST 2001
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