How Logie Baird turned down £1,000 to take a hatchet to his invention
FOR better or worse, it has become an essential part of family life since first being developed in the 1920s. But it has emerged that it could have all been so very different.
The Scot who invented television was offered £1,000 to destroy one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century – after asking a theatre impresario for cash to help him perfect it.
The remarkable encounter between John Logie Baird and showman Fred Collins features in a BBC Scotland documentary that tells the story of Scotland’s first variety agency.
Baird was introduced to the Glaswegian during the mid 1920s as he needed ‘a few hundred pounds’ to perfect the invention that would go on to revolutionise entertainment.
But shrewd Collins instantly recognised the threat it would pose to his booming music hall business and offered him an even greater sum to ‘take a hatchet to the thing and throw it into the Clyde’.
The meeting, which was arranged by a mutual friend of the pair named Jock Kirkpatrick, then manager of Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre, was recorded at the time by Collins’s son Pete who was instructed to take notes.
Fred Collins’s great-grandson Ross Collins, 46, said: ‘In the mid twenties, Fred had a really successful pantomime running in the Coliseum Theatre in Glasgow and his friend Jock Kirkpatrick, who was the Pavilion manager at the time, came to his office one day.
‘He said this chap that he was with was a friend of his from Helensburgh, and this bespectacled, tousle-haired man accompanied him.
‘He said, “He’s got an invention, this guy” and he’s wondering if you would be interested in investing in it. His name’s John Logie Baird.
‘So John Logie Baird sat down with Fred and he outlined this invention, and at the end of the spiel Fred put out his cigar and he stood up and he adjusted his waistcoat.
‘And he said to him, “OK, let me get this straight.
“So this thing that you’ve invented, this television thing; the idea is that you can take any entertainment such as, for example, my pantomime, and you could show it on devices on any home in the country to somebody sitting in their armchair?”
‘Baird said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much the idea,” and Fred said “OK, well, I won’t give you the couple of hundred pounds that you are looking for to invest in this but what I will do is I’ll give you £1,000 if you take a hatchet to the thing and throw it in the Clyde”.’
Fred Collins established The Collins Variety Agency in the early 1900s.
The first of its kind in Scotland, the organisation brought variety to the masses and helped nurture some of the greatest stars of the 20th century.
Fred, and later his sons Horace and Pete, would help shape the landscape of modern theatre over more than 60 years in showbusiness, including reinventing pantomime in the format that it remains today.
Fred could not halt the advance of technology, however, and his fears would eventually be realised as the dawn of TV brought down the curtains on the golden era of Scottish variety in the 1950s. Baird, who was born inHelensburgh, Dunbartonshire, in 1888, demonstrated the first working television system on January 26, 1926.
Television had been a dream of scientists for decades and Baird is credited with inventing both the first publicly demonstrated colour television system, and the first electronic colour television picture tube.
In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission. After WW2, Baird moved to England’s south coast and died on June 14, 1946 in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, aged 58.
The Collins Variety Agency, BBC2 Scotland, tomorrow, 9pm.