It's the 16th August a momentous day in Scottish,
British, indeed world history... and an opportunity missed.
I'll tell you about it in this video. Hiya, I'm Bruce Fummey. If you're
interested in the people, places, and events in Scottish history,
then at the bottom left-hand side there's a button that you can click to
subscribe anytime during this video. In the
meantime, let me tell you a story.
Scots hear John Logie Baird and they think: 'Oh the television guy.'
He was way more interesting than that. Squillions of patents,
hair brained schemes, successes, failures, and a three-way open marriage if you
please. That's perked your ears up, hasn't it?
He was born a son of the manse in this house here in Helensburgh.
In the suburbs. It's actually up for sale as you can see there.
But it's a short walk into town where he has a statue in the esplanade and a
stained glass window in the town's Parish Church.
It's also a walk I'm sure he took many times,
so let me tell you the story as we go.
After school he went on to study at Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical
College. (Strathclyde University) But the First
World War came along. He tried to enlist but he had health
problems throughout his life and he was deemed unfit to be
meaninglessly slaughtered in the trenches of Europe,
so he left college without graduating, and he worked through the war as an
electrical engineer in a munitions factory in Glasgow.
Now imagine you were a sickly bloke from the West of Scotland at the
end of the Great War and you wanted to improve your health
and make your fortune. You'd probably head off to set up a
jam-making factory in Jamaica wouldn't you?
You might be surprised to know that this early venture
failed. You see in many ways Baird was ahead of his time,
but in Jamaica jammin was a ting of the past...
shut it... He had failures. He tried to create diamonds by heating
graphite. He invented a glass razor which was rust
resistant, but shattered. He tried to make pneumatic
shoes, but the semi-inflated balloons in the
soles of his prototype burst, and his injuries were attended to
by a GP called Dr Martens. Yeah, I made the Dr Martens
bit up. OK, so if you arrive back from Jamaica
with your health worse and your money gone, what would you do
then? That's right you'd go to London to
invent the television wouldn't you, yes. It just so happened that a theory
had been put forward for an electronic system of creating light on glass
cathode ray tubes. It'd been put forward by a Scotsman called
Archibald Campbell Swinton. The problem was
that it was only a theory, and developing it required expensive equipment.
John Logie Baird had no money, he just had lots of jam. However
there was a German called Nipkow. Now I know that he sounds like a cattle
thief, but Nipkow was actually a scientist,
and he had suggested a more mechanical theory, which he had also
never proved. Baird had been sent out of London for the sake
of his health, and he was staying in Hastings in a garret room with an old
school chum. So one day he was out for a walk and he
had a flash of inspiration, as these great men do, and he went home
and he and his school chum built the world's
first working television set using an old hat box,
a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses,
a used tea-chest, sealing wax, and glue. And he'd never even see an episode of
Blue Peter. Oh can I ask the Brits, in your own words,
to explain your best memories of Blue Peter to the
Non-Brits in the comment section below; especially if you made something that
they showed you right. Now you might be wondering why this
Heath Robinson approach (how many old-time UK TV references can I
get into one video) It's worth reminding you he was using
his own money, and he had none of it. Now a quick
technical point: the way the TV works is to eliminate
little chunks of the screen in a series of lines
in order to build up a picture. The more strips or lines in the screen, the higher
the definition of the picture. Now Baird was doing this with 30 strips.
Modern HD tellys use up to 1080 strips, so back then
the definition was low, but it was television.
In February 1924, ahead of the competition from around the world,
John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the ability to create television images
of a silhouette. He moved out of his room into a workspace above a shop.
Five months later, while beavering away in this workshop,
he gave himself a one thousand volt electric shock
that threw him across the room and nearly killed him
and British television before it started. He survived but the landlord evicted him
from the premises. Health and safety gone mad... or excessive
electricity bills. I'm not entirely sure which. He had to move back to London
and he had to start again. But by 1925 Baird had come up with an
actual television, that not only showed silhouettes but
full grayscale images, and in January 1926 at the Royal Institution in London
he demonstrated how he had filmed, produced, and
transmitted the first television picture with a grayscale
image of a ventriloquist dummy that he nicknamed
Stookie Bill. This was a triumph! Not only was this real telly, Stooky Bill
went on to become leader of the Conservative party
and serve as Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997.
But there was competition. On the 7th of April 1927
Bell Labs in the US managed to get mechanical television to work as well.
Using a staff of around a thousand, they'd managed to send a signal between
Washington and New York. Baird and his one assistant decided that
they had to up their game. So later in the year Baird trumped the
Americans by transmitting a long-distance television signal
over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow, with the
world's first long-distance television pictures being
shown in the Central Hotel in Glasgow. There were huge difficulties
to overcome, trying to communicate between London and
Glasgow, because both of them talk funny. A voice
from the South East of England isn't so much an accent as an alarm bell
warning that something pompous is about to happen. Likewise any
southern Englishman the Glasgow accent is an indication that
something extreme is about to happen to you. It might be
extremely violent, it might be extremely friendly. Either
way you're gonna wish that you stayed in
Edinburgh.
I'm not here to make friends I'm here to educate.
This is Helensburgh Parish Church, and the colourful stained glass window behind
me is dedicated to John Logie Baird. How appropriate,
because the next year he went on to demonstrate the world's first
color transmission, on the 3 July 1928,
utilizing the fact that any color could be made up of three
primary colours (a principle that had been first demonstrated by another Scotsman
James Clerk Maxwell. I've got a video about him up here if you're interested)
Baird used three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different
primary color, and three light sources at the receiving
end. Now the demonstration was of a young
girl wearing different coloured hats, so it was a Scotsman who broadcast the
first ever televised fashion show. In 1928 he suggested that
radio waves could be used to detect metal objects at a distance,
so when the battle of Britain arrived, this idea was taken up and radar was
invented... by another Scotsman. He also suggested
the infrared could be used to see in the dark...
and he proposed fibre optics. Come on rest of the world catch up,
Scotland's taking a piss out of you! In 1928 he developed an early video
recorder, which he dubbed phonovision. Now, in the unlikely event
that there's anyone under 30 watching this,
your mum will explain video recorder. He set up a company which floated in the
stock market. Finally he had some funding, and in 1928 the
Baird Television Development Company achieved the first ever
transatlantic television transmission, from London
to New York.
John Logie Baird, on the esplanade at Helensburgh. The thing now was to
get the British Broadcasting Corporation to add television to its radio emissions.
Now it so happened that the BBC was being run...
that's right... by a Scotsman John Reith from Stonehaven.
Not only that but Reith and Baird had gone to college together in Glasgow.
In fact Reith had been Baird's bully, and his bullying extended into
later life. Reith did everything to oppose Baird
making or transmitting television programs for the BBC.
The barriers were up, the shutters were down,
entry to the modern world was blocked. You see it's not always the English who
hold us back.
So to show how popular television would be with the public Baird
televised the first live outside broadcast, by transmitting the 1931 Derby
to a packed cinema. This helped Baird get past BBC
intransigence and Lord Reith, and in the early 1930s
both the BBC and the Baird company were producing
programs for the BBC to transmit from South London, but at the opening
ceremony for the public launch of the BBC and the world's first
public service television in London, Lord Reith didn't turn up, and John
Logie Baird, the inventor of television and the man who almost single-handedly
drove the technology forward in Britain, was put in the audience
rather than with the dignitaries on stage.
The BBC held a trial to compare the Baird system with one from EMI Marconi.
Now the trial was to last six months, but initially Baird systems seemed more
cumbersome, and then there was a fire which wiped
out the Baird facilities in London. BBC broadcasts with the Baird system
stopped in February 1937. The Baird Company went into
receivership. Baird went back to operating from a workshop in
his garden.
You can probably tell that we're getting towards the end of our story.
After a heart attack in 1941 John got a job as a Technical Consultant with Cable
and Wireless, and he used his salary to pay for two
assistants to help further develop television. He developed the FAX, which
was promptly forgotten, and then on this day in history, on the
16th of august 1944, he gave the world's first demonstration
of fully electronic, full-colour stereoscopic 3D HD
television... in 1944... without having to wear those daft specs!
He proposed HD colour telly to the British government in 1945.
We didn't even get SD colour telly in oor hoose until 1978!
Because John Logie Baird had a stroke, and in 1946
he died, and he was buried back here in Helensburgh, and his wife
and children had to go and stay with a sister. Without John
Logie Baird television was literally held back by
decades. It's 2020 and we're just now catching up
with some of the ideas that he conceived in 1944.
John Logie Baird; the man who conceived the key mechanism by which we now
gain so much of our news, our information our entertainment,
and our sporting and cultural events, died in 1946 with an empty bank account.
He brought us television. He brought us colour. He brought us the ability to show
Scotland to the world. He deserves that you should share his
story. Without John Logie Baird we'd be in
darkness.
Tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh.
Tiorridh an drasda
cherry and drastic
you