Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 5 on 4/11/2002.

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Vision of the future

SCOT JOHN LOGIE BAIRD IS THE INNOVATOR WHO BROUGHT US AN INVENTION WE NOW CANNOT IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT: TELEVISION

Born in 1888, the youngest of four children, John Logie Baird was the son of Jessie and Reverend Baird who lived in Helensburgh, Glasgow.

Even as a child, Baird was a precocious scientist, designing and constructing an electric exchange between his and his friends’ houses with wires as a primitive ‘telephone’. He made the Baird family home the first in Helensburgh to be lit electrically, and also dabbled in photography and investigated the properties of the light-sensitive metal selenium, which was to be essential in the early development of the television.

Surprisingly, Baird never excelled academically: he did not stand out at school and began a degree at Glasgow University which he never finished. World War I had begun, and, unfit for service, he worked for Clyde Valley Electricity Company as Superintendent. Other Baird projects included selling the ‘Baird undersock’ which stayed warm in cold weather and cool when it was hot, and a jam-making project in Trinidad, which attracted unbearable hordes of insects.

He was increasingly interested in the idea of television and inspired by experiments carried out by a German inventor, Paul Nipkow. Nipkow invented a disc with a spiral of holes through which, if spun fast enough, an image made up of scanned lines would be visible as a unified image due to the eye’s ability to retain and reassemble it. However, at that time there was no way to amplify a signal generated by the photosensitive selenium sufficiently to be viewed.

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By Brigid James

Section : Scottish Innovators

Page number : 82