A Short Biography of John Baird
Exploding socks and glass razors that shattered into thousands of pieces. These were just some of the failed inventions John Logie Baird launched before he finally came up with the art of transmitting moving black and white images through the air – television. Baird was the first to send a picture of a human to a TV screen and the first to send pictures in color. But he was haunted by bad luck and was not allowed to take advantage of his invention or experience the triumph of television around the world.
When a TV show is broadcast, some basic equipment is required. Something should divide the image into a number of points and turn them into electric current. Then the current must be fed to a receiver, where the current is converted back to points. Finally, the points must be joined together in the correct order, so that we can see the picture.
The points that fool the eye
It’s not quite as complicated as it sounds. A black and white photograph has a variety of shades of gray. When such a photo is printed in a newspaper, only black is used. If you look closer, preferably with a magnifying glass, at a black and white photo in a newspaper or book, you will see that it is made up of small dots. At each point, the black color and the white paper have different sizes. At a distance, the points flow together and deceive the eye. By varying the amount of black and white in the dots, it is possible to produce all shades of gray, and the eye sees no or very little difference from the original photograph.
Splitting a photo that way is called rasterization. Color images can also be rasterized, then shades of the colors blue, red and yellow are used together with black.
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Image becomes current
The same principle is used in TVs. Then what is to be transmitted must be divided and converted into electric current. The first to figure out how to do it was the German Paul Nipkow. Some elements emit electrons – an electric current – when they are hit by light. One such element is cesium. The stronger the light, the more electrons are emitted and the stronger the current.
In 1883, Nipkow made a round disk in which he drilled a number of spiral holes. Then he put an image in a projector and showed the image on a layer of selenium, which has similar properties to cesium. The disc with the holes was allowed to rotate between the projected image and the projector. As the holes passed, the selenium plate became differently illuminated depending on whether the light came from a dark or a light part of the image.
When the disc was illuminated differently, it emitted different strong currents. This current was led away in a line to a lamp, which thus flashed irregularly. Nipkow put a disc of the same type behind the lamp in front of the selenium layer and let it spin in time with the first one. Then he could see the image faithfully reproduced on another screen behind the second disc.
Alone and misunderstood
Nipkow could not find any good use for his invention. One of the first to seriously study the possibilities of television was John Logie Baird (1888-1946). He is a typical example of the lonely and misunderstood inventor, who embarks on a series of impossible projects, succeeds in realizing his dream but ultimately fails.
Baird was born in 1888 in Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a priest, very strict – and Baird’s childhood was not happy. He hated school and was often away due to illness. But already as a child he was interested in inventions . Together with a friend, he built a glider, and they threw themselves from a roof hanging under the plane. They immediately crashed and hit themselves quite badly.
Baird graduated as an electrical engineer and began working. But his poor health haunted him. He was often away and eventually resigned.
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Pictures through the air?
Baird tried his hand at a number of projects. He made unsuccessful attempts to make diamonds by heating graphite and invented a glass razor. The idea was that the glass knife would not rust. It did not either – but often shattered into hundreds of small sharp pieces of glass.
He invented an electrically heated sock to keep his feet warm. He made shoe polish and patented a compressed air sock against flat feet. But the socks tended to explode at unexpected moments.
Baird was a bad businessman, and his recurring periods of illness meant that he could not always complete his projects. But then he got a new idea.
After Guglielmo Marconi’s success with wireless telegraphy, engineers had begun discussing whether it would be possible to send images through the air as well as voices.
Baird began experimenting in his bedroom. He made a Nipkow disc and built a simple device. He made the projector from an empty biscuit jar fitted with cheap lenses, and the Nipkow disc was supported against a worn-out washbasin.
Baird achieved his first success in 1924 when he managed to send the image of a Maltese cross.
The BBC starts with TV
In 1925, Baird succeeded in attracting an electrical company, which concluded an agreement with the Selfridges department store in London. For three weeks, Baird showed a small TV show. But the pictures were pretty blurry. Baird continued to work on improving his invention and eventually managed to send a picture of Bill’s belly doll doll’s head. Baird then went and fetched an employee from the company downstairs to his laboratory on Frith Street in London as a guinea pig. The 20-year-old William Edward Taynton thus became the first living person in the world whose face was shown on a TV screen.
By 1926, Baird had reached the point where he could invite members of the Royal Society’s Academy of Sciences and a journalist from The Times to a demonstration.
Baird’s invention was now so good that it interested the British radio company BBC. He started working there, and in 1929 the first television program was broadcast. So far without sound. But in 1930 the sound came, and next year the big horse race was broadcast on Derby.
The electron camera
Now the future looked bright for Baird. But then came the killing blow. From the United States came the electron camera, which used an electron beam to read what was to be transmitted. At the other end, the process was run backwards, so that an electron beam drew the image on a monitor. Baird’s device with rotating Nipkow discs immediately became obsolete.
Color TV is coming
Baird was bitterly disappointed when his device became obsolete. He started again and devised methods both to send pictures in color and to send three-dimensional pictures. But just when Baird was finished, bad luck grinned in his face again. He caught a bad cold and died in 1946 – just as developments in television began to pick up speed again.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 had stopped the development of television, but after the end of the war in 1945, the experiments continued. At the end of the 1940s, regular TV broadcasts started in Great Britain and in Sweden they started in 1957.
The first TV sets attracted a lot of interest. Outside shop windows where the appliances were set up, clusters of people gathered. Soon, TV took home seriously. Today, almost all Swedish households have at least one appliance.
As early as the mid-1950s, Americans were able to make color television programs. In Sweden, a color program was first broadcast throughout the country in 1967. Regular color television was introduced in 1970.
Color TV is based on the same principle as a halftone color photo, where some basic colors that are mixed can form all colors and trick the eye into seeing a complete picture.
Billion-dollar industry
Today, TV is a billion-dollar industry, and in a never-ending stream, images from around the world are carried straight into the living room. Among other things, this has led to politicians having to make an effort to look good in the picture, otherwise they risk losing voters.
TV attracts attention. A thing said in a newspaper can pass unnoticed, while the same statement made on TV can lead to a huge uproar.
Gradually, Baird’s efforts have received increasing attention. In 2006, he was counted as one of Scotland’s top ten scientists of all time. In 2015, Baird was inducted into the Scottish Hall of Fame for engineers. Other members include James Watt , Alexander Graham Bell and James Clerk Maxwell . In 2017, the scientific organization IEEE put up a plaque on the house on Frith Street in London where Baird showed his invention in 1926.
But John Baird never got to experience the success. As with everything else, he was unlucky to the last.
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Tasks and questions
Questions to the text:
- When and where was John Baird born?
- Explain how a black and white halftone photo in a magazine can appear to have different shades of gray, even though only black has been used to print it.
- Baird invented a number of things. Give examples of some of his peculiar inventions.
- In what year could Baird show a person’s face on a TV screen for the first time?
- In what year was the first TV program broadcast?
- Give an example of Baird using simple means when he did his first experiments.
- Why did Baird’s equipment suddenly become obsolete?
- In what year did the TV broadcasts start in Sweden?
- Explain how an image can be shredded and then rendered using Nipkow discs.