Early British Television History

The Background to Baird's 'Phonovision'

Contents: [ Lecture | Who Invented Television, | John Logie Baird, | Where's the Evidence?| Timeline of British Television ]

Lecture "Restoring Baird's Image" - Royal Museum of Scotland - Aug 2002

As part of a John Logie Baird season at the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, I was one of a few guest lecturers invited to present on an aspect of John Logie Baird. Themed on the restoration of the 30-line TV images I covered television from the 19th century through to the present day, setting the recorded material into context of Britain's TV development.

Here by popular request, is the Lecture edited down to 36 minutes. I do not have streaming capability so I advise you to save it to your hard disc.
- REAL MEDIA Medium Quality (80kbps), 22Mbytes
left-click to download & run, right-click to save to disc

Who Invented Television?

The issue of 'who invented television?' will probably never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. Each country believes they have their own televison pioneer(s). People in the US believe it was Jenkins or Farnsworth. The Japanese believe it was Takayanagi. In Russia, Boris Rosing. In France, Belin and Barthelemy. Eastern Europe, von Mihaly. Germany, Karolus. In the UK we have the choice of Campbell-Swinton for concept and Baird for practical demonstration.

A few current authors (Burns and Abramson) have taken a less provincial and more global view and correctly cited almost parallel developments in thinking and experiment around the world. Television had been thought out on paper for some time and had been waiting for developments in electronics to catch up. It did catch up part-way in the early 1920's with the availability of fast, sensitive photo-cells and valve amplifiers. At that time, scanning the picture could not yet be done electronically.

Paul Nipkow invented a method of mechanical scanning for television in 1884. This was basically a disc with a single spiral of lenses or apertures on it. Each lens corresponded to a line of the television picture. One rotation would give one television frame. Not only was it simple to build (for a small number of lines), it could be used for both camera-scanning and display scanning. The Nipkow disc was used by several of these TV pioneers as the basis for their Television system.

A A Campbell Swinton

The concept of television scanned, synchronised and displayed by electronic means belongs back in 1908 to Campbell Swinton. His was the "Distant Electric Vision" as suggested in his letter to Nature (18th June 1908) and subsequent lecture (1911) illustrated with circuit diagrams. This was to be the closest match to the eventual electronic systems in development in the 1920's and a practical reality in the 1930's. However, his concept of television (and it was no more than that) did not apply to today's television system - merely to the valve-analogue implementation.

John Logie Baird

By the mid 1920's there were several experimenters around the world all busy experimenting with their own flavour of mechanically-scanned television. First with a demonstration of 'true' television (by reflected light rather than back-lit silhouettes) was a Scotsman, John Logie Baird. Like his contemporaries, his equipment contained no new major developments that could be attributed to him directly. Baird took Nipkow's scanning disc idea and the latest in electronics and developed this into the first demonstration of 'true' television in London, January 1926.

His system was crude by modern standards comprising only 30 lines per picture. The low resolution drove him to 'tune' the scanning direction and aspect ratio to be a vertically-scanned letter-box. This would allow the best match for head-and-shoulders views.

The years from 1927-1929 were Baird's most innovative. He experimented with all aspects of this new form of communications. These experiments made him a legend in his own lifetime. His mechanical approach allowed him to try out ideas that would not be possible in the electronic systems for many years to come. In fact, colour television, stereoscopic television and television by infra-red light were all demonstrated by Baird before 1930. His transmission of the image of a face across the Atlantic in 1928 was epoch-breaking, but as it was never repeated or developed further, it is merely a demonstration.

He successfully lobbied for broadcast time on the BBC. The BBC started broadcasting television on the Baird 30-line system experimentally from 1929. The first simultaneous sound and vision play was broadcast in 1930. In July 1930, the first British Television Play was transmitted - "The Man with the Flower in his Mouth".

The BBC adopted Baird's 30-line system in 1932 - despite higher resolution systems being available. By 1932, the 30-line system was mature and exceptionally low-cost in engineering terms - the BBC could use their existing audio transmitters for the low-bandwidth video. But it wasn't just the cost of the service, there were no suitable wide-band transmitters readily available for developing a service and there was no infrastructure that could be rolled out to the public in such a short while. Transmissions on the BBC continued until 11th September 1935 as developments in fully electronic television led to the demise of the 30-line service. It was replaced with the world's first regular high-resolution (405 lines per picture) television service by the BBC in 1936.

Where's the evidence of Baird's Achievements?

Precious little tangible evidence of Baird's early achievements exists today. However, Baird did leave direct proof of one of his early experiments. This takes the form of recordings of his 30-line television signal on wax discs. Not only are they a very early record of Baird's work (recorded less than two years after his first demonstration of television) but these discs are the first recordings of television in the world.

RWT115-3 Phonovision Disc
©Pitman 1931

British Television Timeline

The start of television (even just in the UK) is complicated. The BBC takes pity on its viewing public by declaring that Television Started in 1936. In fact, it's an unpopular misconception - an abridgement of the real description.

It should read "World's First, Regular, Public, High-Definition Service" (where 405-line standard is "high-definition" as opposed to the German 180-line standard whose programmes started a short while before). If you really want to understand television history, the Further Reading page will give references to the detail you seek.

Though led by the need for entertainment, the development of practical television was dependent on technology. Britain headed the world with the first demonstration of television by John Logie Baird in January 1926 (the start of the Timeline below) using an opto-mechanical approach. The next 10 years until 1936 saw:

the development and implementation of opto-mechanical television systems based on improvements to existing technology
the technological development of the electronic television camera, which with other improvements to existing electronics systems for radio communications and displays, would lead to a fully-electronic broadcast television system

The timeline below shows the Early Television Recordings in context with the differing phases of development and implementation in Baird's early dominance of British Television:

Increased public awareness after Baird's successful demonstration of television in January 1926 encouraged a highly productive Experimental period where he developed and demonstrated colour television, 3D television, near-infra-red television and recorded television ("Phonovision").
The period roughly from 1929 through 1931 saw Baird start broadcasting of programmes using his 30 line system and giving various Demonstrations of new developments.
The BBC started a regular television service in 1932 using Baird's 30-line standard. The service was terminated in 1935 as the electronic TV camera - under development in the USA and the UK - was showing great promise.
the Baird Company (with a new 240-line standard) lost an on-air competition to Marconi-EMI in late-1936 and the 405-line service continued on its own in 1937. The 405-line service was terminated in September 1939 at the outbreak of war and re-started in 1946.
John Logie Baird had little to do with the competition for the BBC service in 1936. With the take-over of the Baird Company in 1933, Baird focused on R&D projects, notably colour television and cinema projection systems, whilst Capt A G D West took on Baird's prior role directing the technical future of the Company. (So the fact that Baird was missed off the VIP list for the inauguration of the high definition service in Nov 1936 becomes more understandable).

Other Pages

Main Index, | The World's FIRST TV Recordings, | The Earliest Recording of Broadcast TV: Silvatone 1933, | The First Recording to be Sold - Major Radiovision 1934 | the "Marcus Games" Discs

Other Phonovision Pages

Back to Main Page

Last updated by Don McLean on 1 Jan 2007