The website www.bairdtelevision.com is about John Logie Baird (1888-1946), the Scotsman who was the first person in the world to demonstrate a working television system, in January 1926. This was a viable system using mechanical picture scanning, with electronic amplification at the transmitter and at the receiver. It could be sent over ordinary telephone lines and by radio, leading to an historic transmission of television from London to New York in February 1928.
This site provides information not only on J.L.Baird and his life work, but also on other pioneers and on the development of the television industry down to the present day. The NEWS section is on recent events, anniversaries, publications etc. concerning Baird. The CONTENTS section gives access to a gallery of longer articles, some of which go back as far as the 1920s. At the end of the CONTENTS section there are LINKS to other websites on television history.
Updates are made to the site every few months by its creators Iain L.Baird and Malcolm H.I.Baird who are, respectively, the grandson and the son of J.L.Baird.
What's new at Bairdtelevision.com?
(Last updated February 17th, 2008)
Three dimensional displays
Early in 1931, Baird filed a British patent (No.373,196) on a method of imaging three-dimensional television. This was a departure from the usual technique of showing images on a screen in two dimensions and depending on special glasses or lenses to give the viewer the illusion of three dimensions. The patent specified a transparent-sided chamber containing an array of lights, or a translucent fluid, in which a three dimensional image could be formed and viewed.
This patent was overlooked until recently. Dr. Barry Blundell, a former Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of the Virgin Islands, includes it in his new book entitled Computer design in Three Dimensions.
Enhanced Visualization: Making Space for 3-D Images reviewed by Malcolm Baird.
Images Through Space – a new book on television history coming soon
The author, Dr.Douglas Brown, is Director of the Strathclyde Science and Technology Forum at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His book is based on extensive research over the past 20 years and it covers not only the work of John Logie Baird but also the many other television pioneers including Rosing, Dieckmann, Campbell-Swinton, von Ardenne, Zworykin and Farnsworth. Coverage also includes the competition in 1934-36 between Marconi-EMI and Baird Television Ltd.(BTL) for the contract for the BBC television system. Although BTL lost the competition, the company’s research on electronic television (for example by Constantin Szhego and Dr. A. Sommer) had considerable impact on the British war effort in World War II, and on television developments in the USA. Much of this information has not hitherto been published. The book contains a full listing of television patents by J.L.Baird and by BTL. Publication is expected this June, through Middlesex University Technical Resources.
A feature film script on Baird
A film script with the working title “Baird” is being written by the Scottish scriptwriter James McCreadie. The script is based on information in the book “John Logie Baird: a life” by Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird, advertised on this website..
Baird Court in Bexhill-on-Sea
Despite local protests, the house where John Logie Baird died in June 1946 has been demolished to make way for a block of modern flats. However, the new development by Laing Homes is to be known as Baird Court, and its architectural style (at left) is modeled on that of the original house. An article by Malcolm Baird on his father’s last 18 months in Bexhill has been added to the Gallery.
Television Anniversaries in 2008
120th – John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, on August 13 1888.
100th – The Scottish electrical engineer Alan Campbell Swinton proposed electronic television (in theory) in a letter to Nature, in 1908. However electronic television was not developed as a working system until the early 1930s. [see Gallery item on “4 key players in early television”].
80th – On February 8-9 1928, Baird organized the transmission of television images from London to Hartsdale, just north of New York City. A few days later, television was sent to a ship in mid-Atlantic, the R.M.S. Berengaria. The transmission to New York was widely reported in the press [see Gallery item]
80th – In March 1928, the first issue of the monthly magazine Television (price 2 ½ pence) was published by the Television Society. Today the magazine of the same name is published by the Royal Television Society, priced at ₤12 per issue. Not surprisingly, today’s magazine is much larger and glossier than the first issue!
70th -- On February 4 1938, Baird Television Ltd. gave the first public showing of large screen colour television at the Dominion Theatre in London. The pictures were sent by short-wave radio from the company’s laboratory at the Crystal Palace.
65th – On October 28th 1943, Baird gave a technical lecture to the British Institution of Radio Engineers, on “Colour and Stereoscopic Television”. In spite of wartime conditions, the auditorium was packed.
30th – Baird Television, a manufacturing division of Thorn Consumer Electronics, located in Bradford, Yorkshire, closed in July 1978 with the loss of 2200 jobs. This was one of the last television manufacturing units in the UK. The picture at left shows the derelict factory with the “BAIRD” logo faintly visible at the top of the stack.
20th – In August 1988 the centennial of Baird’s birth was marked by several public events. The West Parish Church in Helensburgh held a Service of Dedication of memorial windows marking the life and work of John Logie Baird. In the same month, BBC Scotland Television showed a docudrama on Baird entitled I Chose Madness, produced by Dorothy-Grace Elder.
Other new books on people in J.L. Baird’s circle
John Logie Baird was a public figure during the second half of his life and his circle included many interesting people who were also public figures. Several of these are mentioned in recently published books which are noted below.
Kew Edwin Shelley (1894-1964)
Mr.Shelley was a London barrister who helped Baird to form a new television company in 1944 and later became co-executor of his estate. Shelley was a paternal grandson of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee (1844-1906) who had been the first president of the Indian National Congress. In 1921 Shelley had changed his surname from Bonnerjee by deed poll. His background is detailed in Family History, by Janaki Agnes Penelope Majumdar (edited by Antoinette Burton, published 2003, Oxford University Press). In her memoir, written in 1935, Mrs.Majumdar provides a personal account of two distinguished anglophile Indian families.
William Le Queux (1869-1927)
Le Queux was a phenomenally successful spy story writer of the early 20th century and his writings are said to have led to the formation of MI5. He was living in Hastings while Baird was doing his early television experiments and he gave moral (but not financial) encouragement. A detailed biography, William Le Queux, Master of Mystery, has been written by Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister and privately published by them in 2007.
John C.W.Reith, (1889-1971)
Sir John Reith was Director General of the BBC while Baird and his company were trying to convince the BBC to broadcast television. In a new memoir entitled My father, Reith of the BBC,(2006, St.Andrew Press, Edinburgh), Marista Leishman provides a unique view of her father’s prickly and eccentric personality, against the backdrop of his public achievements and eventual elevation to the peerage. This book confirms that Reith did not like television, though his personal relationship with Baird was not as bad as has sometimes been alleged.
Leonard Frank Plugge (1889-1981)
Mr. Plugge was a pioneer of commercial radio broadcasting to the UK in the 1920s and 1930s, when such programmes were transmitted from continental Europe for legal reasons. He first met Baird in the Hastings days and they met frequently in London during World War II, when Plugge was an M.P. and chairman of the Parliamentary Scientific Committee. A biography of Plugge entitled: And the World Listened -- Leonard Frank Plugge, by Keith Wallis, (Kelly Books, UK) is expected in March 2008 and a review will soon appear on this website.
Many books and articles have been written about John Logie Baird, but few poems have appeared. This contribution is by Andrew Roxburgh McGhie, Associate Director of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter at the University of Pennsylvania.
An engineer sae bricht
There was an engineer sae bricht
Work’d ilka mornin’, noon and nicht
Until, at last, he got it richt
His lifelang mission
Aye, ‘twas sic a bonnie sicht
Yon television
He was a lallan lad wha dared
E’en tho’ few bawbees could be spared
He fashed and went that extra yaird
Tae gar it rin
Salute we nou John Logie Baird
Oor brawest yin
For he went at it, heid tae heid
‘Gainst RCA an’ a’ that breed
Nae gowk was he. Our trusty steed
Left them ahint
Life changed fore’er thro’ his guid deed
As weel we kennt
Nae muckle better could it be
He gie’d it colour and 3-D
Wi’ infra-red thro’ nicht he’d see
But the worl’ him spurns
Let’s honour him as oor third B
Alang wi’ Bruce and Burns
John Logie Baird: a life
hardback * c. 450 pages * 70 b/w illustrations
...a meticulously researched story based on first hand interviews and quoting many new documentary sources, some of which have only recently become available. At long last we have a book that sounds and feels like the truth about the man who was the first in the world to demonstrate working television (Michael Bennett-Levy, 2002)...click here for the rest of the review
"Kamm and Baird, the latter the inventor's son, paint a strikingly clear portrait of the inventor who started it all." (Russell A Potter, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (US) 2004)
Read the full text of the JLB promotional brochure here
Television and Me: The Memoirs of John Logie Baird
paperback * c. 160 pages * heavily illustrated
The autobiography of John Logie Baird. A new version of his memoirs, only published previously as a specialist monograph, are written with blunt candour and caustic wit. His memoirs cover the wild escapades of his early business career and the dramatic pioneering days of his scientific work.
"Television and Me" was named Critic's choice, Scottish book of the year 2004.
Excerpt: Baird's Story is Pick of the Best
(Scottish Daily Mail, Jan. 7th, 2005) by Tom Kyle
It is rare indeed to find a book of real literary, scientific and historical importance.
So the appearance in the spring of the little-known and almost unpublished, autobiography of the most influential Scot who ever lived was the most significant publishing event of the year. Television and Me: The Memoirs of John Logie Baird ... was living proof that the best books need not always be the most lavish or expensive.
Baird tells his own story - from his Helensburgh boyhood to the great and precarious days when the first television pictures were transmitted, to his ultimate betrayal by the BBC - with a caustic turn of phrase and a self-deprecating wit.
His memoir is a fabulous distillation of all the joy and bitterness, hurt and humour of an extraordinary man. I said at the time I doubted there would be a better written, more interesting or more important book published in 2004. I see no reason to revise that opinion now.
The Scots Magazine, September 2004
"...Baird was not given the recognition which was his by right during his lifetime."
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