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TV turns 100: John Logie Baird launched a new era
On January 26, 1926, an excited audience got to see a blurry image broadcast live. It was a sensation.
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John Logie Baird was born in Scotland in 1888. As a child, he built his own switchboard for himself and his friends, according to the National Library of Scotland. At the age of 15, he began developing television.
Before he succeeded, he tried his hand at less successful inventions. Baird invented socks that absorbed moisture, a glass razor, and air-filled soles. He also made money selling jam from the Caribbean.
At the same time, he worked on creating TV.
“The idea of television had been floating around since the end of the 19th century. Radio and the telephone had been invented and showed that sound could be transmitted through cables or the air. So then images became the next thing,” says Henrik Grue Bastiansen.
He is a professor at the media studies department at Volda University College and has written about the first television in the journal Mediehistorikk tidskrift (link in Norwegian).
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Succeeded in 1926
Baird was not the only one working on transmitting images from one place to another. Large American companies were also trying. They had far more resources than a lone inventor in Scotland.
“He was worried that someone else would get there first, but he managed to be the very first,” Bastiansen tells Science Norway.
On January 26, 1926, Baird invited people to the world's first public demonstration of television. It was a big event with selected guests. Live images were transmitted from one room to another.
The first television used a mechanical approach, according to Bastiansen. A disk with holes spun in front of an object and picked up light from this object strip by strip. The flashes of light were captured and converted into electrical signals. These signals were sent to a receiver that had a similar disk, which recreated the image.
“They had to use spotlights so strong that living people couldn't stand in front of them. So Baird made a doll, called Stooky Bill, which stood in front of the camera,” says Bastiansen.
Afraid of the effect on our private lives
Baird himself said that those present did not understand what they were seeing. Several were afraid that this would be the end of all privacy, because the new device would be able to see through walls and around corners. One woman anxiously asked if she could protect her privacy by pulling down the blinds.
Baird's TV picture had 32 lines, so the image was not very sharp. Today's TVs have more than 1,000 lines. Baird's screen was very small, so Stooky Bill had clear features.
“Baird's television attracted a lot of attention. He received a lot of attention and press coverage, and he knew how to take advantage of that,” Bastiansen says.
Planned to sell TVs
Baird's plan was to make money by selling TV sets, but he was quickly overtaken by his competitors.
That didn't stop Baird.
He further developed his own device, inventing a video player and the storage of recordings on magnetic tape. He also experimented with fibre optics.
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Two years after the first TV broadcast, Baird demonstrated colour television in public. And he was behind the first transatlantic TV transmission. Stooky Bill appeared on a tiny screen in New York, broadcast live from London. Then Baird himself appeared.
The BBC's powerful director was opposed to television and believed that radio was the future, Bastiansen says. Nevertheless, the BBC also started with television.
“The British got off to a good start because of Baird, but then he was forgotten, probably because they saw mechanical television as a sidetrack, and they overlooked the fact that he also worked on electronic TV and many other inventions,” says Bastiansen.
Norway came late
It took 34 years from Baird's first demonstration to the official launch of television in Norway.
“Baird's television and developments abroad were well known in Norway. When the Norwegian Parliament passed the Broadcasting Act in 1933, they were aware of TV technology and therefore included both sound and images in the legal text,” says Bastiansen.
But even though the law was ready, it took a long time to both pass and bring television to Norway.
In 1935, several Norwegian newspapers reported on how far television had advanced abroad. 'Television is moving towards perfection,' was the headline in Telemark Arbeiderblad on December 28, 1937. By then, a British company had succeeded in showing television images in life-size – two metres tall. The newspaper also wrote of Baird's experiments with colour TV and that there were then 'no fewer than 7-800 television receivers in London.'
The war put a brake on TV development. In the United States, England, and Germany, TV broadcasts stopped. The transmission network was needed for military communications, according to Bastiansen.
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In 1950, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) set up a committee to investigate television.
In 1953, the Norwegian Parliament approved trial broadcasts. They began the following year. NRK set about building expertise, studios, a broadcasting network, and TV transmitters in Oslo and Bergen.
Mountains made broadcasting more difficult
In 1960, the official opening took place.
This was six years after Denmark and four years after Sweden.
“They weren't really slow. It was far more demanding to build out the broadcasting network in Norway than in flat Denmark. Here, the transmitters had to be built on mountaintops,” says Bastiansen.
He thinks it's important that we know the history of the media we use every day.
“We're not that good at long-term perspectives. If we don't know anything about where a medium comes from, we can't really understand it,” he says.
Fewer and fewer people now watch linear TV. Bastiansen is studying how the internet and smartphones affect how we watch TV and how NRK has responded to this development.
“Users now decide for themselves what they want to watch and hear. That changes radio and TV as media, but they're not disappearing. And people still gather in front of screens when there are big events, like the Olympics,” Bastiansen says.
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Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk
Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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