John Logie Baird

John Logie Baird (1888-1946), Scottish engineer and television pioneer. He invented the first commercially viable apparatus to transmit and receive visual images.

Baird was born in Helensburgh. He attended Larchfield Academy, the Royal Technical College, and the University of Glasgow. Because of his poor health, he was unable to serve in World War I (1914-1918) and could not keep work as an electrical engineer. He pursued many interests, then settled upon electronics after learning of the successes that Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi had achieved with radio.

In 1925, while supporting himself as a shoe shiner and a razor-blade salesman, Baird made significant improvements to a photomechanical image transmission design that had been built in the late 1800s. The heart of Baird’s apparatus was the Nipkow disk, a mechanical apparatus invented by German scientist Paul Nipkow in 1884. To transmit images, Baird used the same basic technique that Nipkow had used, but he improved on the earlier design by employing the newly invented photoelectric cell. With this improved apparatus, Baird succeeded in transmitting the image of a ventriloquist’s dummy from one end of his attic apartment to the other. He immediately ran out to look for a live model, and later the same day he repeated his experiment with a young boy acting in place of the dummy. This was the first transmission of a recognizable moving image.

Baird named his invention the Baird Televisor, and in January 1926 he demonstrated it for a group of investors. The next year he demonstrated television via telephone line between London, England, and Glasgow. He started selling his Televisor in kit form in 1929, and later that year he succeeded in synchronizing audio and visual transmission. Late in 1929, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began transmitting its news and variety shows using the Baird Televisor format. It was the first commercial use of television.

Rapid advances in the electronics industry soon overtook the Baird Televisor, and by 1937 its format was replaced by all-electrical methods of transmitting and receiving images. Baird made several other contributions to television technology. He is credited with demonstrating color television and stereoscopic (three-dimensional) television. Using disks made of wax and magnetic steel, he was also the first to make electrical recordings of visual images for television.