scte long read
1925 was the result of decades of work by scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic working towards the common, if imprecise, goal of the production and transmission of a moving image, an extension of the radio, and the credit for which is hotly contested even now. Other big names working on various forms of what we now know to be television included Charles Francis Jenkins, one of the founders of SMPTE, who was developing electro-mechanical TV, Vladimir Zworykin and Philo T Farnsworth who worked on electronic TV, and let’s not forget Leon Theremin, also put into operation a mechanical TV in 1926-1927, but is often overlooked as he was based in Russia. Richard Welsh, President of SMPTE was correct in his assessment that “The early evolution of television is not a story that’s told that much. There’s an assumption that television was just invented at a certain place and a certain time, but the reality is people were thinking about television in the late 1800s, building mechanical devices to get an image on a screen. It wasn’t about broadcast at that point.” This was in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, a time of frenetic innovation, supreme Victorian confidence and seemingly endless funds to throw at R&D, so it is perhaps not surprising that television’s embryonic early stages coincided with the development of cinema and the radio.
Big Brother, Top of the Pops, The Fast Show or any number of gameshows, there are countless others (and that’s just British TV). ‘Computer says no’ is part of everyday language and impossible to explain without reference to TV.
In 2025 this seems so long ago but we are fortunate that Iain Logie Baird, grandson of John is a passionate custodian of Logie Baird family history and told Broadband, “My father was only 11 years old when John Logie Baird died. So my father knew him, but only as a child. He was allowed into the lab only very occasionally; he did see colour television around 1944 with 600 lines, which was quite comparable to the PAL system that we had over 20 years later.” Iain also added some texture to the story, explaining that the advent of rising populism and nationalism in the 1930s did little to advance the technology and a lot to pit opposing groups against each other. One can view this in the spirit of competition of course, but at one stage Iain tells us the British, Americans, Germans, Japanese and Russians were all racing to establish patents and manufacturing partners simultaneously. “There was even a small Canadian contingent of inventors, because their patents were bought out, or they borrowed patents from my grandfather, in one case.” The story goes that Baird was in London, experimenting with a ventriloquist dummy, one of three nicknamed ‘Stookie Bill’ in a laboratory in Soho when he achieved his first clear image - just two eyes and a mouth, prompting him to race downstairs and put his assistant William Painton on a stool in front of the camera, asking him to stick his tongue out to make sure it worked. Painton, not realising the
TV has also been the existential bogeyman for the cinema industry
throughout the last century as technology came and went (VHS, Betamax, 3D TV, DVD, laser disc, Blu-ray, cable, satellite and now of course we are in the brave new world of streaming), not to mention the evolution of the hardware itself. From a small box in the corner that barely evolved in 50 years to wall-mounted, 4K digital flatscreens complemented by eardrum popping surround sound, the rise of the home-cinema system has seen the television become the focal point of our living rooms, hanging on a bracket over the mantlepiece. With all that in mind it is miraculous cinema has endured at all. Invention of Television The invention of the television (the first use of the word ‘television’ is attributed to Constantin Perskyi in 1900, who used it in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress in Paris on August 24) was far from a one-off Eureka moment conducted by one man in isolation, much as history likes to pinpoint single dates in a convenient, linear manner; the reality is John Logie Baird’s first mechanical television transmission on October 2,
SEPTEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.3
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