From the bedroom to the boob tube.

In the early years of the 900s the typical people’s entertainments were the theatre and the cinema. John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer from Helensburgh, rigged up a telephone exchange for transmitting some images in “low definition” (30 lines) from his bedroom to his friend’s house across the street.

John Logie Baird

This was the first experiment of video transmission at short range. In 1926 he showed to the members of the Royal Institution a video transmission experiment from his office in London, he improved it in the next two years, when he transmitted from London to Glasgow (438 miles) and then from London to New York. The transmissions took place from an electromechanical television based on the Nipkow’s disc patented in 1884. The electromechanical system was improved step by step and Baird founded the first Television company, the Baird Television Development Company (BTDC).

Baird Television Develpment Company BTDC

In 1929 the German post office rented the facility out to Baird, so that he could develop the first experimental television service at the time. Sound and vision were initially sent alternately, and they began to be transmitted simultaneously from 1930. The Baird’s system became early obsolete, and his TV became an historical relic. For this reason, he proposed an electronic system which worked on 240 lines and based on Philo Farnsworth’s boob tube. He tried to compete with Guglielmo Marconi-EMI’s project, which proposed an electronics television system based on 405 lines to the BBC in 1935, but he lost the competition, since the British government closed the “low-definition TV” and selected Marconi’s “High definition” system. Today Baird is remembered as the father and inventor of the most important discovery: the TV.