Restoring Baird's Image - IET Digital Library

Foreword
'Well what's the good of it when you've got it. What useful purpose will it
serve?'
Frith Street, London on a cold wet January night in 1926, the group of
eminent scientists from the Royal Institution had struggled up a series of
dank narrow stairs to witness the demonstration of a new invention. On the
whole, they were not impressed. Whilst most of them felt that the shrouded
equipment hid some trickery, some went so far as to denounce the inventor
as an 'absolute swindler'. Only a handful of the forty or so visitors that
night had anything positive to say about what they had seen.
In his excitement and enthusiasm the inventor seems to have misread
the reaction. Writing later he said, 'I was certainly gratified by the interest
and enthusiasm. The audience were for the most part men of vision who
realised that in these tiny flickering images they were witnessing the birth
of a great industry.'
With hindsight we know that John Logie Baird was correct in his belief
that it was the "birth of a great industry". We also know that no one (not
even Baird) had any inkling of how great and powerful that industry was to
become. With that same hindsight we can also begin to plot the changing
public perceptions of Baird's achievements.
By the time BBC 405-line television started in 1936, Baird had travelled
from obscurity to triumph to uncertainty. A few more months and he had
begun the slide back into obscurity. For the next ten years he continued
research, mainly into large-screen television and high definition colour
where he produced some stunning developments. These, and many of his
other television "firsts" such as stereoscopy, infrared, outside broadcasts,
transatlantic television, video recording and colour go unrecognised by the
public.
The mechanical television system he championed was, like its inventor,
thrown on to the scrap heap by the mid 1930s, written off as an inferior,
low-tech solution. It is rather surprising then that several elements of
Baird's system resurfaced at CBS in 1950 (field-sequential colour), at
Mullard in 1960 (the Banana tube) and on the moon in 1969 (Apollo 12 TV
camera). Mechanical scanning is widely used today in fax machines,