The first live TV audience found it hard to believe that it would take off. Now the invention of the mechanical television has been marked with a Google Doodle
Ninety years ago today a moving head on a screen made history. It was the first public demonstration of live television, and the occasion is being marked with a Google Doodle.
...The mechanical television, also known as “the televisor” worked a bit like a radio, but had a rotating mechanism attached that could generate a video to accompany the sound. It preceded the modern television, which creates images using electronic scanning.
In 1924 Baird managed to transmit a flickering image across a distance of 10 feet and the following year, he had a breakthrough when he achieved TV pictures with light and shade.
Within two years this flicker was the face of a woman who was in a different room.
...Although the pictures were small, measuring just 3.5 by 2 inches, the process was revolutionary.
“The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the ‘televisor,’ as Mr Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face,” wrote the reporter from the Times after the demonstration.
...Baird returned to the University of Glasgow in 1928, when he gave a lecture, simply titled 'Television', to students in the Engineering Society. He explained how the television worked, the difficulties he overcame and the benefits of a wireless system.
He is also said to have expressed a belief that television would soon be of commercial importance.
Baird developed colour TV and brought out the world's first mass-produced television set in 1929 and from then until 1937 the BBC used Baird’s company for its television broadcasts.
The mechanical TV didn’t last much longer, however - it was outstripped by the electronic television in the 1930s. This didn’t deter Baird, who continued to work in television innovation and eventually gave the first demonstration of a fully electronic colour TV in 1944.
Baird died after suffering a stroke on June 14th 1946 in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex aged 58.
As innovative as the demonstration had been, the journalist wasn’t convinced that it would take off.