A Scottish inventor laid the foundations of television a hundred years ago

But then no one knew: that scene had little to do with the global phenomenon that television would end up becoming.

A rudimentary experiment

On January 26, 1926, in a makeshift laboratory at 22 Frith Street, in the London neighborhood of Soho, Baird gave the first public demonstration of his “television” to a small group of guests, including members of the Royal Institution, a historic British scientific society.

The image, shaky and in black and white, was not that of a person, but the head of a ventriloquist dummy nicknamed Stooky Bill, chosen because the powerful lighting required made the heat unbearable for a human being.

The press of the time barely devoted any space to the event. A correspondent for the British newspaper The Times described two days later a “successful test of a new device,” in which figures such as a hand, a pipe or a notebook could be recognized in motion. The chronicler closed his text with caution: “It remains to be seen to what extent further developments will bring Baird’s system into practical use.”.

A stubborn inventor

There was nothing to predict then that this experiment would mark the beginning of a medium that would transform information, entertainment and daily life.

Born in 1888 in Helensburgh, a town in western Scotland, Baird was a tenacious electrical engineer and inventor, accustomed to failure. Before finding the key to television, he accumulated failed projects, among them the so-called Baird Undersock, a thermal garment that never had commercial success.

That enduring spirit was recently recalled by one of his grandsons, Iain Logie Baird, during a conference in London to mark the centenary. “Television would have arrived eventually, but without its urgency and drive it would have arrived in Britain much later,” he said, underlining that his grandfather’s life was marked by constant experimentation.

From the laboratory to the present

After the 1926 demonstration, the development of television was rapid. In the following years the first experimental broadcasts began and, Already in the 1930s, the BBC began regular transmissions from London, first with low-definition mechanical systems and later with broadcasts then considered “high definition.”.

Many of those broadcasts were made live and were not preserved, since the technology to record them did not yet exist. Despite this, the available archives reveal a surprisingly varied program for the time, with theatre, opera, ballet, cultural debates, competitions, sports broadcasts and the first television dramas, while television began to make its way as a new window to the world.

In Scotland, the centenary has also served to look back and forward. Engineering students at the University of Strathclyde, where Baird trained as a youth, have built a functional replica of his mechanical television, adapted to current technology, which even allows images to be sent from mobile phones.

One hundred years after that blurry image of Stooky Bill, television continues to evolve, but its origin dates back to that Soho laboratory and the stubbornness of a Scottish inventor convinced that images could also travel through the air.