One hundred years ago, on 2 October 1925, Scottish inventor John Lochy Baird successfully transmitted a recognisable moving image of a human face. The first television star was a young clerk, William Tainton, who returned to television 40 years later to tell the BBC about this defining moment.
Scientists had been working on the invention of television since the 1850s, but it took a lone experimenter working with old bicycle lamps, wooden scraps and tin biscuit boxes to make it a reality.
Before his great breakthrough, John Logie Baird had been a “serial inventor” with mixed success. He was the son of a minister, chronically ill most of his life, and was declared unfit for service during World War I
. Instead, he began working in weak lungs, but the working conditions were a real nightmare in terms of safety. He set up a laboratory for television experiments, improvising equipment from rubbish – for example, from an old tea chest in which he placed an engine.
At the centre of Baird’s system was a large disc rotating at high speed, scanning image line by line with photo detectors and intense light. The signals were transmitted and reconstructed to create moving pictures. When he succeeded in transmitting a silhouette, the eternal dream of television took real form.
After being electrocuted in his laboratory in Hastings, Baird moved to London. He rented a flat above a shop at 22 Frith Street in Soho and set up a new laboratory there.
His mechanical device emitted the following chaos,” Taynton said. He had cardboard discs with bicycle lenses and everything, lamps of all kinds, old batteries and very old motors that he used to spin the disc,” Taynton said.
Baird put it in front of the transmitter – the man could provide the propulsion that the still Stuka Bill lacked.
Taynton said he began to feel warm and scared, but Baird assured him there was nothing to worry about.
“He disappeared to go down to the receiver and see if he could see the image,” Taynton recalled. – I concentrated, but I couldn’t stay there for more than a minute because of the terrible heat from the lamps, so I left.
For his pains, Baird put half a crown (two shillings and sixpence) in his hand – his first television fee – and coaxed him back in and a bit mad at the time.
He peered into a small tunnel and saw “a tiny picture about 5×8cm”.
Suddenly, Baird’s face appeared on the screen. You could see him covering his eyes, mouth, and movements. It was of poor quality, of course. There was no clarity, you could only see shadows and lines flowing downwards. But it was a picture, and it moved, and that was Baird’s major achievement. ‘He’s got a real television image,’ Taynton told the BBC.
Still full of excitement, Baird asked Taynton what he thought of his creation.
‘I replied bluntly, “Mr Baird, it’s not very impressive. It’s very crude. I saw your face, but there was no clarity.” And he said it was just the beginning. He said: “This is the first television and you will see it in every house across the country and even plaques.
Sir Robert Renwick, president of the Television Society, said at the time, ‘Although this plaque stands in the centre of London, its real monument is in the forest of aerials that are springing up all over the country’.”
And just a few years after Taynton recalled her brief role in television history in 1965, people around the world were stuck on screens watching the moon landing.
Science fiction had become science fact.