Television is 100 years old today.
And it was born here, above an Italian cafe in Soho.
The man who first demonstrated television was John Logie Baird, a former engineering apprentice from Helensburgh. And although there are other places that can plausibly claim to be TV's birthplace, including a terraced street in Hastings, a hill in north London and Selfridges, most people agree that the decisive moment was a demonstration given to journalists in Frith Street on 26th January 1926.
Baird might never have made it to London had he not been a sickly boy. When WW1 broke out he wanted to enlist but was refused due to ill health, so took a job with the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company helping to make munitions instead. In 1923 he moved to the south coast for the good of his health because it had a warmer climate, renting rooms at 21 Linton Crescent in Hastings. Here the first television signal transmitting equipment was constructed, with component parts including a hatbox, tea chest, darning needles and bicycle light lenses. The first image to be transmitted was the shadow of a St Johns Ambulance medal with a distinctive spiky outline, an item still on display at Hastings Museum. But his tinkering proved dangerous, and although a 1000-volt electric shock thankfully resulted in nothing worse than a burnt hand, his landlord duly asked him to vacate the premises.
Baird moved to London in November 1924 in the hope of showing off his burgeoning invention, setting up a workshop in the attic at 22 Frith Street. Amongst those who dropped by was Gordon Selfridge who invited Baird to give demonstrations of his device in the Palm Court during his store's upcoming Birthday Week celebrations. He gave three shows a day to long queues of spectators, each invited to peer down a funnel at outlines of shapes transmitted from a separate device a few yards away, including a paper mask which Baird would make 'wink' by covering the eyehole. At this stage Baird's 'Televisor' was still electro-mechanical, the images formed by spinning discs with doubled-up lenses and perforated rectangular holes. But spectators were impressed, and Baird earned a much-needed £60 to plough back into his enterprise.
By October 1925 Baird had honed his processes sufficiently to be able to transmit an image with gradations of light and shade. Initially he used a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill, this because it had greater contrast than a human face and also because it wouldn't be harmed by intense heat or possible exploding glass. Later, somewhat over-excitedly, he invited a 20 year-old office worker called William Taynton to come upstairs and become TV's first human subject. William wasn't keen but an appearance fee of half a crown persuaded him to pick through a jungle of wires, sit in front of blazing hot lamps and stick his tongue out, for just long enough that Baird exclaimed "I've seen you, William, I've seen you. I've got television at last!" When the time came for a blue plaque to be unveiled outside 22 Frith Street in 1951, it was William they invited back to do the honours.
Then on 26th January 1926 came the first official demonstration to members of the press. Journalists and guests from the Royal Institution were invited into Baird's workshop in small groups and first shown the dummy on screen, then each other's faces transmitted from a separate room. Only one visitor got too close to the discs and ended up with a sliced beard. Most of those present weren't especially impressed and failed to realise the significance of what they'd just seen, but The Times followed up with a short article two days later.
Members of the Royal Institution and other visitors to a laboratory in an upper room in Frith-Street, Soho, on Tuesday saw a demonstration of apparatus invented by Mr. J.L. Baird, who claims to have solved the problem of television. They were shown a transmitting machine, consisting of a large wooden revolving disc containing lenses, behind which was a revolving shutter and a light sensitive cell. It was explained that by means of the shutter and lens disc an image of articles or persons standing in front of the machine could be made to pass over the light sensitive cell at high speed. The current in the cell varies in proportion to the light falling on it, and this varying current is transmitted to a receiver where it controls a light behind an optical arrangement similar to that at the sending end. By this means a point of light is caused to traverse a ground glass screen. The light is dim at the shadows and bright at the high lights, and crosses the screen so rapidly that the whole image appears simultaneously to the eye. (The Times, 28th January 1926)
These days 22 Frith Street is home to retro cafe Bar Italia. It's been owned and run by the Polledri family since 1949, a coffee-squirting dynasty who also run the Little Italy restaurant nextdoor. The stone floor was laid by their uncle Torino, a terrazzo mosaic specialist, and the counter was one of the first in London to be graced by an original Gaggia machine. Once a magnet for mods on scooters Bar Italia has attracted many famous names over the years, notably Rocky Marciano whose poster has pride of place behind the counter. You could thus celebrate today's centenary with an espresso and a slice of pizza in the photo-bedecked interior, or risk sitting outside below the neon sign with a froth and cheesecake combo.
Number 22 also displays a Milestone plaque erected by The Institution of Electrical Engineers citing "the world's first public demonstration of live television". Below is a much newer plaque citing this as an accredited World Origin Site. I first saw one of these inside the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum earlier in the month, earned for the discovery of penicillin, but whereas that was designated WOS 0001 the invention of television only ranks 0037. I believe they're unveiling it officially at 2pm this afternoon, even though it was perfectly visible over the weekend.
Baird was a highly driven inventor and entrepreneur and went on to develop prototypes for all sorts of forward-looking formats. In 1927 he came up with ‘Phonovision’ (image recordings onto 78 rpm gramophone records) and ‘Noctovision’ (infra-red TV). In 1928, amazingly, he demonstrated both colour television and stereoscopic (3D) television. His ultimate aim was television broadcasting via the BBC, beginning experimental transmissions of 30-line television in 1930 and delivering the first outside broadcast (from the Derby) in 1931, not that anyone was yet watching.
But in 1932 EMI started to provide serious competition, developing their own pioneering electronic television camera called the Emitron. The government's Television Advisory Committee ultimately recommended that both Baird's 240-line mechanical system and Marconi-EMI's 405-line electronic system be developed as alternatives for the proposed new London television station. And so it was that when broadcast TV first launched at Alexandra Palace on 2nd November 1936 the two systems alternated one week each... Baird second.
It rapidly became clear that the Marconi system was far superior and Baird's was dropped after just three months. Baird also suffered when his studios were burned in the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace, and his company went into receivership when all TV broadcasting was suspended at the start of WW2. He carried on inventing at home in Sydenham, vastly improving his system for colour television, until his laboratory was made unusable by bomb damage. Alas ill health caught up with him and he died after a stroke at the age of 57, just one week after the BBC restarted television broadcasts in 1946. You can't see his final home in Bexhill because it was replaced by a block of flats in 2005, but Baird does have an impressive number of plaques across central London and SE26.
It's not always easy being first, and after early televisual success John Logie Baird saw his star wane and fade. But it's still him we remember for making possible one of the key transformative inventions of the 20th century, even though barely anyone watched his first efforts. It took ten years to get from Stooky Bill to BBC TV's opening night, then another two decades before the widespread adoption of TV sets in British households and two more until colour television took hold. But 100 years on almost all of us have a TV set at home and effectively another in our pocket, and all because a Scotsman came to London and cleverly spun some discs.
