HISTORY
John Logie Baird’s Television Demonstrations at Selfridges
By Iain Logie Baird and Malcolm Baird
It has been 100 years since John Logie Baird’s historic demonstrations of television at the Selfridges department store. Its founder, the American retail magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, was primarily interested in selling the latest fashions and consumer products but he was also willing to go beyond the ordinary and sell almost anything. Selfridge had built a reputation for creating spectacle in the store by exhibiting the latest technological developments, for example, in 1909— just one year after the store opened—Blériot’s monoplane was put on display soon after he had crossed the English Channel. An estimated 150,000 visitors viewed the plane over four days. It may surprise readers that the first television system demonstrated at Selfridges was not John Logie Baird’s. In 1914, an inventor-cum- journalist called Archibald M. Low had been invited to demonstrate his ‘Televista’ system which used a matrix of selenium cells on rollers as camera, while at the receiver, an array of bimetallic strips opened light paths. The apparatus functioned but the photo-electric response of selenium was not fast enough to enable the system to produce moving pictures, thus it was more like a fax system than television. The lag of photosensitive elements was a problem that had plagued television scientists and inventors for years, and it was first solved by Baird, at least in practical terms. At the time of his television demonstrations at Selfridges in March 1925, Baird was still seven months away from achieving what he considered ‘true television’. The purpose of this article is to tell the story of Baird’s television demonstrations at Selfridges, including some new material not previously published.
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SEPTEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.3
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