Today’s television is so ‘compact’, it fits in the palm. But in 1926, when the first working television was demonstrated, it was a revolution in a post-Great War industrialising world, syncing communication, information, democratisation, and convergence. Prior to the internet, TV (an abbreviation coined in 1948), emerged as one of the greatest inventions, opening the world to people in their living rooms. John Logie Baird, the Scottish electrical engineer who envisioned the concept, went down in history for inventing something that relayed and projected that very history, as it unfolded.
Baird was born as the youngest child to clergyman Reverend John Baird and Jessie Morrison Inglis, on August 13, 1888, in Helensburgh, Scotland. Going to Larchfield Academy, the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, and the University of Glasgow, he worked as an engineering apprentice through his academic life.
The industrial wave in Glasgow cemented his inventive genius. In early 1923, Baird to move to Hastings, England, where he created what was to become the world’s first working television, out of an old hatbox, a pair of scissors, darning needles, bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue. In February 1924, he demonstrated that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images.
In 1925, he successfully transmitted the first television picture with a grayscale image at his laboratory: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy nicknamed ‘Stooky Bill’. On January 26, 1926, Baird gave the first public demonstration of true television images for members of the Royal Institution, which was the first time that a TV system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation was demonstrated. He went on to demonstrate the world’s first colour television on July 3, 1928 in London, utilising electro-mechanical technology, thus giving the world an invention that shrunk it.