A Scottish visionary Baird thought outside the box to change the world

IT may have been the accent. Or perhaps it was the unfashionably long, rather unkempt hair and the dogged persistence.

It certainly terrified the news editor of the Daily Express, who insisted to a colleague: “For God’s sake go down to reception and get rid of the lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him – he may have a razor on him.”

The “lunatic” was carrying not a weapon but rather information about what would have been a world exclusive for the paper had fear of what the young Scotsman might do not led to his peremptory ejection.

It was the invention of television and the visitor to the black glass-fronted building in Fleet Street was John Logie Baird.

At the time, in the early 1920s, there were scientists all over the world, from Moscow to New York, many of them highly resourced, trying to do what Logie Baird had achieved. He, by contrast, had borrowed money from friends and relatives and to describe his first television set as primitive is a monumental understatement.

Among the components were a pair of scissors, an old hatbox, darning needles, bicycle light lenses and a used tea chest, all held together with sealing wax and glue.

Baird was born and brought up in Helensburgh. He was a sickly child but a compulsive inventor.

He was educated at the local school, Larchfield Academy, then Glasgow and West of Scotland College (now Strathclyde University) and the University of Glasgow. He never graduated, his studies interrupted by the First World War. He tried to enlist but was rejected on health grounds.

He had also had a rather chequered history of inventions. He had tried to create diamonds by heating graphite. His glass razor might have been rustresistant but, rather predictably, broke.

His pneumatic shoes using halfinflated balloons exploded but were the germ of the idea which became Dr Martens boots years later.

Stuck in a jam

AFTER his rejection by the army he went to Trinidad and Tobago where he had come up with the idea of using the copious local fruits in a jam factory. That came to a sticky end.

But he had studied electrical engineering and, in 1923 and in poor health, was living in Hastings which is where he put together his first TV set. In February the next year he demonstrated to the Radio Times that it was possible to transmit moving silhouette images. In July 1924, he burned his hand badly after suffering a 1,000-volt shock and his landlord kicked him out as a result.

Baird moved his laboratory to 22 Frith Street in Soho, central London, where he perfected his invention. In October 1925, he successfully transmitted the first television pictures of the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy he called “Stooky Bill”, then of a 20-year-old office worker called William Edward Taynton who became the first person to appear on television.

On January 26, 1926, Baird invited 50 members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times to his lab and repeated the experiment, so the scoop came in The Thunderer, not the Express.

A year later, Baird transmitted the first long-distance television pictures over 438 miles of telephone line from London to the Central Hotel in Glasgow.

There’s a blue plaque on the wall in Frith Street where the first TV pictures came from, but nothing visible on the walls of what is now called the Grand Central Hotel.

Never one to rest on success, in 1928 Baird produced the first colour TV pictures of a young girl wearing different coloured hats. She was Noele Gordon, who went on to be an actress and appear in the television soap

Crossroads, set in another hotel, and as famous for its wobbly sets as well as viewing figures – 18 million at its peak.

The new-fangled device wasn’t universally welcomed, of course. The editor and owner of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, was dismissive. He said that “the word (television) is halfGreek and half-Latin, predicting: “No good will come of it.”

The inventor had borrowed money from friends and relatives – and to describe his first television set as primitive is a monumental understatement

Channel changing

WHEN you look at some of the programming on TV today you may well think Scott was right. Masked dancers? Competitive sewing competitions? Naked attractions? What would Baird, now at rest in Helensburgh graveyard, make of what became of his invention?

It is likely that TV, too, is dying, or certainly as we know it. We’ve come a long way from families sitting down together at a fixed time to watch a favourite show.

It is no longer communal – it has become personalised. You can take your programme with you, on tablet, laptop or phone, and watch when you want, where you want. Streaming and WiFi, has made that possible.

It’s 75 years since the ‘father of television’ John Logie Baird passed away

– so what would he make of his invention today?

Television companies are also being forced to change because of that. In the past you paid a licence fee – or advertising paid – for a bundle of channels, many of which might not be of interest to you. Along came Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and the unbundling.

Viewers could pick and choose what they wanted to watch and how much they wanted to pay.

This is bound to grow although there may be casualties along the way. Content has become king. In 2019, Netflix spent an estimated $15 billion, 85 per cent of its total spending, on original content.

Apple TV+ plunged $6bn into original content before it launched its streaming service, and Disney Plus spent $1bn on original programming in 2020.

The BBC can’t compete against this – no British broadcaster can. The corporation will be forced to shrink and politicians may demand a partsubscription model, but it really can’t be justified paying for a licence on pain of prison any more.

Sky, too, will have to adapt and unbundle more of its channel, so that subscribers can pick and choose what they want to watch rather than pay for them all.

Streaming services also evade the censor – for broadcast TV that’s Ofcom. So, there is no legal insistence on impartiality, however it’s defined by the overseers.

And with technology so advanced and so cheap now anyone can make their own programmes and put them out on one of the numerous platforms.

The streaming services like Netflix have sophisticated algorithms and collect mounds of data so that they can predict the kind of programming we watch, and tailor future shows to that as well from our viewing choices to make recommendations.

These services have also shown that it’s possible to develop a business model that includes little or no revenue from advertising, based on subscriptions.

Interactive vision

TELEVISION will certainly become more interactive so that viewers will be able to influence dialogue, plot and outcomes.

It will also become more immersive and virtual reality development, the wearing of VR headsets, will allow viewers not just to watch a show but step into it.

Streaming also cuts out the middle men, the picture house owners, the Rupert Murdochs, connecting customers directly to content producers and entertainment companies. Cinema may not die, but it will become even more of a niche, dependent on big-budget movies and streaming delays, and young people with nowhere else to cuddle, if that still applies.

It will be 75 years tomorrow that John Logie Baird’s health overwhelmed him and he died following a stroke at just 57. His invention changed the world and the way we see the world.

The inscription on the gravestone of the family plot in Helensburgh has just a two-word tribute. Television pioneer. He was so much more.