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- Home
- the old site
- British Association Lecture, Leeds, 1927
- John Logie Baird in America, 1931
- Television in 1932, BBC Annual Report, 1933
- The Wonder of Television, 1933
- Television To-day and To-morrow, 1939
- The Televisor: Successful Test of New Apparatus 1926
- Next We'll See to Paris, 1927
- Transatlantic Television in 1928
- How Stereoscopic Television is Shown, 1928
- Baird's Trip to Trinidad in 1919
- Alice, Who art Thou? An old mystery
- The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, 1930
- Televising the Derby, 1931
- Televising the Derby, 1932
- H.G. Wells and J.L. Baird
- What was Early Television Actually Like?
- 1932 Television Demonstrated in 1952
- Crystal Palace Television Studios
- Television on the West End Stage in 1935
- What did JLB really do in World War II?
- High Definition Colour Television, 1940–1944
- John Logie Baird—the final months, 1945–1946
- Life with an Inventive Father, 1985
- Down the pub with John Logie Baird?
- A Personal Journey, 2000
- The Making of JLB: The Man Who Saw The Future, 2002
- John Logie Baird the innovator
- John Logie Baird and his Contributions to Television
- Print versus Television: from Baird to McLuhan
- SMPTE and IEEE recognitions of JLB's work
- Television at the 1939 New York World's Fair
- Four Key Players in Early Television Development
- Terry-Thomas and the Baird Portable
- University of Strathclyde exhibition, 1990
- Malcolm Baird looks back on 90 years of UK television
- Television—75 years after Alexandra Palace
- The Farnsworth Invention Saga
- Television, Radar and J.L. Baird, 1923–46
- Baird Television Ltd. and Radar
- Television and Me—The Memoirs of John Logie Baird
- Book and Film Reviews
- Other Television Inventors & Links
- BBC television
Transatlantic Television in 1928
The New York Times, February 9th 1928
HARTSDALE, N.Y. Feb.8—A man and a woman sat before an electric eye in a London laboratory tonight and a group of persons in a darkened cellar in this village outside New York watched them turn their heads and move from side to side.
The images were crude, imperfect, broken, but they were images none the less. Man's vision had panned the ocean transatlantic television was a demonstrated reality, and one more great dream of science was on the way to realization.
The demonstration was made by the Baird Television Development Company of London, using short-wave radio sets for transmission of the "vision sound" and the televisor invented by John L.Baird—who has also invented an instrument for seeing in the dark—for turning this sound back into vision after its ocean hop.
The transformed vision of the man and woman in the London laboratory came through the ether in the form of a bumblebee's hum, a musical buzz or irregular cadence representing in sound the lights and shadows of their faces—all that was transmitted in the test.
When the televisor, a black box compact enough to be carried around in a taxi, had done its work with this rhythmic rumble from across the sea the visions gradually built themselves up of tiny oblongs of light suspended in a whirling rectangle of brilliance in the machine's gaping mouth.
The vision of the woman appeared broken and scattered, but it was still plain that she was a woman and that she was showing first the full face and then the profile.
The demonstration was attended on this end by Captain O.G. Hutchinson, managing director of the Baird Company, who came to this country especially for the purpose Benjamin Clapp, who has been working on secret tests of the televisor R.M. Hart, owner of short wave radio station 2CVJ, who has done the receiving of the vision sound and an Associated Press reporter.
The vision sound was sent across the ocean by short wave radio station 2KZ, of only two kilowatts power.
[partial extract from leader in New York Times, February 11th 1928]
...His success deserves to rank with Marconi’s sending of the letter “s” across the Atlantic—the first intelligible signal ever transmitted from shore to shore in the development of transoceanic radio telegraphy. As a communication Marconi’s “s” was negligible as a milestone in the onwards sweep of radio, of epochal importance. And so it is with Baird’s first successful effort in transatlantic television. .… Whatever may be the future of television, to Baird belongs the success of having been a leader in its early development.