Birth of the television age: 1926

@Mark Ollig

A hundred years ago, electricity, telecommunications, and radio were shaping the world of technology.

A new broadcast medium was emerging from a small attic in London’s Soho district.

John Logie Baird, born Aug. 13, 1888, in Helensburgh, Scotland, became fascinated early on with sending images over wires.

After World War I, he moved to London and set up a laboratory in two attic rooms above a shop at 22 Frith Street.

There, he built a prototype television from whatever he could find, including bicycle wheels, biscuit tins, old lenses, and leftover radio parts.

His system used a spinning Nipkow disk to scan images one line at a time, turning them into flashes of light.

A photoelectric cell converted these flashes into electrical signals, which were then amplified by vacuum-tube circuits similar to those found in 1920s radios.

Baird achieved what is often considered one of his first clearly successful demonstrations of television Oct. 2, 1925.

In 1925, others were also working on television, but Baird demonstrated a working system that transmitted recognizable moving images from a scanner to a receiver.

This breakthrough brought him significant recognition.

Baird used an early mechanical scan of about 30 lines at roughly five images per second to transmit a small, dim, high-contrast picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy head he called Stooky Bill.

At the receiving end, a synchronized disk and a modulated light source recreated the image on a ground-glass screen.

Curious to see how a human face would appear, Baird later asked 20-year-old office worker William Edward Taynton to sit under bright lamps in front of the scanning disk.

Taynton is often regarded as the first person televised in an identifiable, full-tone image.

Observers said the pictures were dim and sometimes shaky, but faces were still easy to recognize, complete with movement and expressions.

Photoelectric cells in the 1920s were not very light-sensitive, so human faces had to be lit intensely for the cell to produce a strong enough signal for recognizable features.

Baird gave a public demonstration of his working television system Jan. 26, 1926, in his upstairs laboratory at 22 Frith Street.

Although he had produced experimental images in 1925, the 1926 demonstration brought television into public view.

Baird named his electromechanical device the “Televisor.”

The demonstration showed that live moving pictures could be scanned, converted into an electrical signal, and sent to a receiver in the same room.

Baird’s improved 1926 system used a disk with about 30 holes arranged in a spiral, spinning at about 750 revolutions per minute to produce a 30-line image at roughly 12.5 images per second.

Most sources do not list the exact operating voltages for Baird’s 1926 equipment, but vacuum-tube circuits of the period typically used low-voltage filaments, often about four to six volts.

Higher direct-current plate supplies could range from several tens to several hundred volts.

On the receiving end, a neon tube provided the light for the ground-glass viewing screen.

Neon lights respond quickly to changes in signal strength, making them well-suited for mechanical scanning.

The resulting image was small, dim, and tinted orange, a common characteristic of early neon-lit television pictures.

The Times of London reported Jan. 28, 1926, that the demonstration showed it was possible to transmit and instantly reproduce movement details.

The reporter wrote that the image was “faint and often blurred,” but it “substantiated a claim that through the ‘Televisor’. . . it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.”

By spring 1926, Baird had begun demonstrating that sound could accompany the images.

The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune reported May 23, 1926, “To demonstrate his televisor, Mr. Baird speaks into the transmitter of the device located in his laboratory.”

The paper added, “The inventor’s voice is heard and the picture of his face is seen very clearly, witnesses say.”

The Austin Daily Herald reported Aug. 27, 1926, that British radio authorities had granted Baird licenses for television, allowing him to build and sell televisors and establish a service that let owners “look in” as well as listen to programs.

That fall, newspapers continued searching for words to describe what audiences were seeing on Baird’s televisor.

The Bayonne Evening News in New Jersey referred to the image broadcast technology as “radiovision,” Nov. 19, 1926, while other newspapers described it as “seeing by radio.”

A report dated Sept. 11, 1926, in the Illustrated London News presented readers with a detailed technical diagram of Baird’s television system.

It displayed and labeled Baird’s image transmitting station, showing a large spinning disk, rows of lamps illuminating the subject, and amplifiers boosting the signal.

The receiver was depicted as a wooden cabinet with its own spinning shutter, controls, and a small glass viewing screen.

The newspaper called television a “new radio miracle” and predicted the technology would “eventually give us sight as well as sound by wireless.”

Baird continued testing the limits of his system.

Later in 1926, he demonstrated that television signals could travel beyond the laboratory, either over wires or by wireless radio on medium-wave frequencies of about 200 meters (about 1.5 MHz).

In late May 1927, Baird proved that television signals could be transmitted over specially conditioned telephone lines, sending images from London to Glasgow, about 438 miles through the long-distance telephone circuit.

The images were described as grainy, but the transmission over the telephone circuits worked.

Baird’s mechanical system established that moving images could be scanned, transmitted, and reassembled at a distance.

By 1936, television had fully shifted to electronic broadcasting, leaving behind the spinning disks of the 1920s.

John Logie Baird died June 14, 1946, at age 57, in Bexhill, Sussex, England.

Today, the former laboratory at 22 Frith St. in Soho is home to Bar Italia, a cafe.

A plaque installed in January 2017 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers marks the building as the site of the “First Public Demonstration of Television, 1926.”