Let us remember the date again: October 2, 1925 . It was that day when the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird managed to transmit in London the image of a doll thanks to a mechanical television system.
The set had nothing to do with our idea of a television. His machine was based on the Nipkow camera, very similar to a photographic camera obscura but with a moving light entrance hole.
Baird, a Scottish engineer and inventor, conducted this first test of a working television system in his London laboratory, where the image he successfully transmitted, the head of a ventriloquist dummy in a vertically scanned image of 30 lines, at five images per second in grayscale, achieved a milestone at that time.
His experiments suggested that the minimum number of television lines to produce a recognizable image of the human face was 30, and this was the standard he adopted. (It would have been easy enough to increase the number of lines in the lab, but like other television pioneers, he ran into the problem of limited bandwidth to amplify and transmit signals.) Thus ‘low definition’ television was born.
Due to the success of the test, Baird called an office worker, William Edward Taynton , who was in his 20s at the time, to see what a televised human face would look like. Taynton thus became the first person to appear on television in a full tonal range.
The media must have known, so he ran to the office of his local newspaper to give an account of his invention. However, they called him crazy . The news editor was terrified by his claims, described Baird as a madman who claimed to have a machine to watch wirelessly, and even warned the receptionist to be careful around him because he could be armed with a razor and be violent.
Finally the appearance in the media would have to wait until January 1926 , when he repeated the historic broadcast for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times, back in his laboratory. Since a few months had passed, the scanning speed had improved to 12.5 images per second. It was the world’s first public television demonstration.
This would not be his last achievement. He went on to demonstrate the world’s first color transmission in 1928 , and in 1932 he became the first person in Britain to demonstrate ultrashort-wave transmission.
Although Baird’s electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems (such as those of Vladimir Zworykin, Marconi-EMI, and Philo Farnsworth), his early successes earned him a prominent place in the invention of television.
As a curiosity, the giant Google honored with a curious doogle in 2016, the public demonstration of the Royal Institution of 1926 on the occasion of the 80th anniversary.
