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John Logie Baird

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Engineers and inventors

   Bust of John Logie Baird in Helensburgh.
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   Bust of John Logie Baird in Helensburgh.

   John Logie Baird ( August 13, 1888 – June 14, 1946) was a Scottish
   engineer, who is best known as the inventor of the first working
   electromechanical television system.

Birth and education

   Baird was born in Helensburgh, Argyll, Scotland. He was educated at
   Larchfield School (now part of Lomond School), Helensburgh; the Glasgow
   and West of Scotland Technical College (which later became the
   University of Strathclyde); and the University of Glasgow. His degree
   course was interrupted by World War I and he never graduated.

Television experiments

   Although the development of television was the result of work by many
   inventors, Baird is one of its foremost pioneers. He is generally
   credited with being the first person to produce a live, moving
   television image in halftones by reflected light, among other major
   advances he later made in the field. Baird achieved this, where earlier
   experimenters had failed, by obtaining a better photoelectric cell and
   improving the signal conditioning from the photocell and the video
   amplifier.

   In his first attempts to invent television, Baird experimented with the
   Nipkow disk, and demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical
   analogue television system was possible with the transmission of moving
   silhouette images, such as his fingers wiggling, in his London
   laboratory in February 1924. Baird gave the first public demonstration
   of moving silhouette images by television at Selfridges department
   store in London in a three-week series of demonstrations beginning
   March 25, 1925.

   On October 2, 1925, John Logie Baird was successful in transmitting in
   his laboratory the first television picture with halftones: the head of
   a ventriloquist's dummy, in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at 5
   pictures per second. Baird went downstairs and fetched an office boy,
   20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look
   like. He became the first person to be televised in full tonal range.

First public demonstrations

   Baird repeated the transmission for members of the Royal Institution
   and a reporter from The Times on January 26, 1926 in his laboratory at
   22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. By this time he had
   improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the world's
   first demonstration of a true television system, one that could
   broadcast moving images with tone graduation.

   He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on July 3, 1928,
   using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three
   spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary
   colour; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator
   to alternate their illumination. That same year he also demonstrated
   stereoscopic television. In 1932 he was the first to demonstrate
   ultra-short wave transmission.

Broadcasting

   In 1927 Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438
   miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow. He then set up the
   Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first
   transatlantic television transmission from London to Hartsdale, New
   York and also made the first television programme for the BBC. He
   televised the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby in 1931. He
   demonstrated a theatre television system, with a screen two feet by
   five feet, in 1930 at the London Coliseum, Berlin, Paris, and
   Stockholm. By 1939 he had improved his theatre projection system to
   televise a boxing match on a screen 15 feet by 12 (4.6 by 3.7 m).

   From 1929-1935, the BBC broadcast television programmes using the
   30-line Baird system. In late 1936 the BBC began alternating Baird
   240-line transmissions with EMI's electronic scanning system which had
   recently been improved to 405-lines after a merger with Marconi. The
   BBC ceased broadcasts with the Baird system in early 1937.

   Baird's television systems were replaced by the electronic television
   system developed by the newly formed company EMI- Marconi under Isaac
   Shoenberg, which had access to patents developed by Vladimir Zworykin
   and RCA. Similarly, Philo T. Farnsworth's electronic Image Dissector
   camera was available to Baird's company via a patent-sharing agreement;
   however, the Image Dissector camera was found to be lacking in light
   sensitivity.

   Baird made many contributions to the field of electronic television
   after mechanical systems took a backseat to electronic systems. In 1939
   he showed colour television using a cathode ray tube in front of which
   revolved a disc fitted with colour filters, a method taken up by CBS
   and RCA in the United States. On August 16, 1944 he gave the world's
   first demonstration of a fully electronic colour television display.
   His 600-line colour system used triple interlacing, using six scans to
   build each picture. During 1944 he persuaded British authorities to
   make plans to adopt his proposed 1000-line Telechrome electronic colour
   system as the new post-war broadcast standard. The picture quality on
   this system would have been comparable to today's HDTV. The Hankey
   Committee's plan lost all momentum partly due to the challenges of
   post-war reconstruction. The monochrome 405-line standard remained in
   place for three decades until the introduction of the 625-line system
   in 1964 and ( PAL) colour in 1967.

Other inventions

   Some of Baird's early inventions were not up to standard. In his
   twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted
   out Glasgow's electricity supply. Not long afterwards Baird perfected a
   glass razor; it was completely rust resistant, but it shattered.
   Inspired by pneumatic tyres he had a go at pneumatic shoes, but his
   prototype contained semi-inflated balloons which burst. He also
   invented a thermal undersock, which was actually a mild success.

   Baird's numerous other developments demonstrate his particular talent
   at invention. He developed, in 1928, a primitive video recording
   device, which he dubbed Phonovision. The system consisted of a
   Phonodisc, which was a 78rpm record that could play a 30-line video
   signal. His other developments were in fibre-optics, radio direction
   finding, infrared night viewing and radar. There still remain, however,
   questions about his exact contributions to the development of radar,
   for his wartime defence projects have never been officially
   acknowledged by the British government. According to Malcolm Baird, his
   son, what is known is that in 1926 Baird filed a patent for a device
   that formed images from reflected radio waves, a device remarkably
   similar to radar, and that he was in correspondence with the British
   government at the time. Much of the information regarding Baird's work
   in this area is just beginning to emerge.

   There is a working model of the Baird televisor in the London Science
   Museum.

Legacy

   From December 1944 until his death in 1946, Baird lived at a house in
   Station Road, Bexhill On Sea, immediately north of the station itself.
   Baird died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England in 1946 after suffering a
   stroke in February of that year.

   TV now spans the globe and is the world's most popular form of
   entertainment, offering multiple channels covering all sorts of
   subjects.

   In the Channel 5 programme Don't Get Me Started, aired on 29 August
   2006, presenter Selina Scott complained about the falling standards of
   British TV with such shows as Big Brother and other "reality"
   programmes. Malcolm Baird said in an interview that had his father
   known how TV would turn out in sixty years time, he would have dropped
   it and turned to something else.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird"
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