John Logie Baird
Baird’s inventions didn’t always work as well as his televisions.
1888-1946
King George V 1910-1936 to King George VI 1936-1952
Baird’s inventions didn’t always work as well as his televisions.
1888-1946
King George V 1910-1936 to King George VI 1936-1952
Scotsman John Logie Baird (1888-1946) built and demonstrated the first working TV, which he assembled largely from ordinary household objects in his own home.
IN 1923, John Logie Baird pressed an old hatbox, a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a handful of lenses taken from bicycle lights, a tea chest, and some glue into service, and made the world’s first working tv set.
He had already had some success as an entrepreneur with a medicated sock for soldiers in the trenches of the Great War. His youthful attempt to turn graphite into diamonds had merely fused all the lights in Glasgow’s Rutherglen area.
But on 2 October 1925, he made history with the world’s first tv transmission, starring a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed ‘Stooky Bill’.
In 1928, Baird sent tv pictures across the Atlantic for the first time, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and three years later he oversaw the world’s first remote outside television broadcast, at the Epsom Derby.*
Some of Baird’s innovations were far ahead of their time, including colour tv in 1928, and three-dimensional, high-definition tv in the early 1940s.
A flat (i.e. no jumps) horse race, held at Epsom in Surrey in early June each year.