Cold Open - Eureka!

It is the morning of October 2nd, 1925, in a building in Soho, London.

In worn beige slippers, 37-year-old John Logie Baird dashes down a narrow staircase, taking the steps two at a time and calling out for help.

At the bottom of the stairs, John crashes into William Taynton, a 20-year-old office clerk, and sends him tumbling to the ground. Pulling William to his feet with hurried apologies, John asks if he can come up to his laboratory at the top of the building because there is an emergency.

Before William can say no, John grabs him by the arm and pulls him upstairs. William tries to ask what the trouble is and whether John wouldn’t be better off finding someone else, but John waves away all questions.

He flings open the door to his lab. This converted attic is dominated by long pine workbenches. Wires snake across the floor, and heavy electrical cabinets line the walls.

In the center of it all stands a strange machine, with motors, wheels and lamps. In front of it is a wooden chair.

John guides William toward it. This is the emergency. John needs a test subject. William glances around nervously as John moves one of the lights closer, until it is just inches from William’s face.

John then steps behind a screen standing upright in the corner of the room.

He flips a large gray switch. The machine whirs to life, the lamps illuminate, and William is blinded with light. Above the electric hum, John can hear William wince. He knows that the heat of the lamps must be uncomfortable. But it won’t last long. Because he moves fast—he twists dials, adjusts lamps, and checks the receiver. 

John makes one final adjustment as William shifts in his seat, sweat running down his temples. John is sweating, too, as this is the movement he's been waiting for. Will his contraptions work? He peers at the screen in front of him. But just when a ghostly image starts to materialize — William jumps up and bolts for the exit. The heat is too much.

John intercepts him before he reaches the door and presses a cold coin into William’s hand. Half a crown—that’s more than William usually makes in an entire day. John tells him it’s his fee. Because he’s just made the first-ever appearance on television.

After years of failure, this experiment marks a breakthrough for the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird —he has successfully transmitted a moving image of a human being for the first time. But his new device is far from perfect. And months of trial and error will follow before he’s ready for the first public demonstration of television, on January 26th, 1926.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is January 26th, 1926: The First Television.

Act One: An Inventor’s Life

It is late 1924 in Hastings, on the south coast of England, just a year before John Logie Baird transmits William Taynton’s image.

Inside a makeshift bedroom workshop, John tightens the bolts on an enormous motorized spinning disc. Measuring eight feet across, it’s fitted with glass lenses that run around its outer edge.

This disc is the essential part of John’s latest invention, which he calls the “televisor”. The spinning lenses are meant to break an image into signals that can be sent to a receiver and then turned back into a picture. He's been experimenting with the wheel for weeks now, but he’s yet to get the results he wants.

John is from the west coast of Scotland. The son of a church minister, he was a sickly child with weak lungs and spent much of his time indoors. But he was smart, and he went on to study electrical engineering in Glasgow, where he excelled.

When World War I began in 1914, John wanted to enlist and fight for his country. But the British War Office declared him medically unfit. Much to his shame, John was forced to stay behind while others of his generation went to fight and die on the front lines.

So he took work as an engineer with an electrical power company—it was a good, stable job, with a decent wage. But it didn’t satisfy his curious nature, and he would spend his breaks sketching ideas for wild inventions that might help Britain win the war. After two years with the power company, his restlessness got the better of him, and John left to work on his ideas full-time.

What followed was a string of failures. There was a shaving razor made of glass that only shattered, air-filled shoes that punctured, and a useless homemade hemorrhoid cream. But despite the setbacks, John was not discouraged. When one idea would fall flat, he would simply think of another and try again. Until eventually, one idea worked.

John knew that many soldiers on the front lines were suffering from trench foot, a debilitating condition caused by prolonged exposure to damp and cold. So he came up with the idea of socks with a special lining to absorb excess moisture. The product sold well and brought John a steady income. Enough that he could now afford to leave Scotland and head south.

His doctors advised him that the sea air would help with his lung problems, so he settled in the coastal town of Hastings. And it’s here that he began developing his most ambitious idea yet.

Radio is already transforming communications. But John believes that if sounds can be transmitted through the air, then so, too, could pictures. As someone who spent much of his childhood confined in bed by illness, the idea feels personal. If people can’t go out into the world, then the world should be able to come to them.

And in recent days, after months of solitary work in his seaside laboratory, John has achieved something remarkable. He’s transmitted a crude silhouette of his head and shoulders from one device to another. The image was unstable and extremely faint, but it was there, and it was moving.

Now, John thinks by increasing the speed of his spinning disc, he might get a clearer image. So today, he will attempt 750 revolutions a minute—his highest speed yet. But he’s nervous. If one of these lenses were to come loose at that kind of speed, it would become a dangerous projectile.

So after tightening the bolts one last time, John steps back and switches on the power. The disc begins to rotate. Slowly at first, but then faster and then faster still. The lenses blur into a single ring. And for a moment, John thinks it’s working.

But then one of the lenses shears free. Glass explodes against the wall. Another lens follows and then another. John ducks beneath a workbench, covering his head in his arms. Until finally, the disc itself wrenches loose, destroying the frame that holds it and tearing across the floor.

By the time the wheel has stopped moving, the lab is almost completely destroyed. This experiment will bring John’s time in Hastings to an end. His exasperated landlord will evict him and force John to pay for all the damage he’s caused.

For someone else, this dramatic failure would be a good reason to give up. But John Logie Baird will remain convinced that he’s on the right track. Within days, he will salvage what he can from the wreckage of his lab, pack up his belongings, and leave the coast behind. This time, London is calling.

Act Two: Bill and Baird

It's October 2nd, 1925, in John Logie Baird’s London laboratory, one year after his eviction from Hastings.

John balances a ventriloquist dummy on a chair in front of the latest prototype of his televisor. The doll is awkward and uncooperative—its head keeps slipping out of position, causing its bright orange hair to brush dangerously against the edge of the machine John is working on.

Trying to contain his growing irritation, John steadies it with both hands before gingerly stepping away.

John has nicknamed this dummy “Stooky Bill”—Stooky being a Scots word for plaster, as well as a slang term meaning “dumb” or “silly”. But Stooky Bill is more than just a joke—it's a vital part of an experiment that John believes could change the world. John has painted Stooky Bill’s face with primary colors to enhance its features. The eyes are encircled with thick black, and he’s made the mouth more distinct with layers of dark red.

Then, stepping over to the control panel, John turns up the power of his machine. Stooky Bill’s face shines under the blazing lights. The motorized disc begins to turn. John then crosses the room and hurries to the receiver at the far end of the laboratory.

As the disc spins, the lenses embedded in its surface capture an image of Stooky Bill line by line. John’s machine then turns those lines into an electrical signal and sends them through the air to the receiver. There, the process is reversed, and if everything works properly, the original image should appear on the screen.

John has been working on this invention all year. He’s rented rooms above an office in the Soho district of central London, and he can now reliably produce moving silhouettes and has even demonstrated that publicly. He believes that means he’s solved the fundamental problem—his system can now pick up and transmit images. The question is now whether it can show them clearly enough to be of any use.

So, John peers into his receiver. As the machine whirs across the room, the usual shadows appear, followed by a blurry, thin silhouette of Stooky Bill’s head.

Then slowly, the picture begins to sharpen, bit by bit, until the image is there. Not a silhouette, not a shadow. But a recognizable face.

The contours of Stooky Bill’s head are clearly visible—the red mouth, the elongated nose, the dark hollows painted around the eyes. It’s all there.

Excited, John jumps up and down, causing Stooky’s head to unbalance and fall to the side—but for once, John isn’t irritated because the receiver picks up that movement as well.

John wheels around in delight. And in that moment, he realizes something. It’s movement that makes his invention special. But Stooky Bill can't move without a puppeteer, and John can't work the machine and operate the dummy simultaneously. So, if he’s going to show others what his invention can really do, he’ll need a new test subject, one that can move independently.

Suddenly energized by this idea, John switches off the televisor and rushes from his laboratory. And it doesn’t take him long to find a new guinea pig. Trashing into office clerk, William Taynton in the stairway. After giving William half a crown in payment, John tells his subject that this machine will change everything. One day, television will allow people to watch distant events unfold without leaving the comfort of their living rooms.

William listens politely, not believing him for a second. But John knows he is inching closer to realizing the potential of his invention. He's gone from transmitting blurry silhouettes to clear images of a real, moving human being. And now he’s ready for the next steps.

Within days, John Logie Baird will register a company to develop his newest invention commercially. He will call it Baird Television Limited. He’ll have big ambitions for his new business. But there’s still much to do before televisors can begin appearing in people’s homes. He knows his invention works. But now he’ll have to prove it in front of an audience.

Act Three: An Audience

It’s January 26th, 1926, in Soho, London, three months after John Logie Baird successfully transmitted a moving image of doubtful William Taynton.

John moves quickly around his laboratory, checking wires and wiping dust from the lenses of his machine. The air is warm, and the lamps are heating up.

Today is the day.

Years of work have led to this moment. Failures in Hastings. Broken machines. Long days working alone. But now, at last, John is ready to show off what he's built.

Forty scientists from the esteemed Royal Institution have been invited. Slowly, they begin to arrive, filing into the cramped room in their heavy winter coats. Some look curious. Others doubtful. But once they’ve all gathered, John offers a brief welcome and thanks them for coming. Then he sets to work.

William Taynton now takes his familiar place in front of the machine. At the control board, John increases the power. The scanning disc begins to turn. The lamps blaze. And as he’s been instructed, William pulls exaggerated faces. At the receiver, an image appears on the screen. The scientists lean forward.

The image is blurry. It flickers. But it’s clearly William’s face, and it’s moving.

Some of the scientists wonder aloud whether this is a hoax—a theatrical sleight of hand using mirrors or other trickery. But as they look skeptically over the apparatus, John doesn’t say a word. He knows there’s nothing for them to find. He lets the images speak for themselves. And eventually, everyone in the room is convinced.

When the demonstration ends, the room buzzes with conversation. The picture may have been crude. But the principle is unmistakable. Moving images have been transmitted electrically from one place to another. The scientists make their way out in animated conversations among themselves. John, though, stays behind, exhausted and exhilarated. He’s delighted by his achievement, but he knows this is not the end, just the beginning.

In the years that follow, he will continue to refine his system. In 1928, he will demonstrate color television, and the following year, he will collaborate with the BBC to transmit the first television broadcasts.

And just as John Logie Baird predicted, his invention will change the world. The mechanical system he created will eventually be overtaken by electronic devices, with sharper pictures and more reliable screens. But that will not diminish what happened in John’s small Soho laboratory, where he proved his ingenious concept with the first public demonstration of television on January 26th, 1926.

Outro 

Next on History Daily. January 27th, 1944. Soviet forces defeat the German army outside the city of Leningrad, ending an 872-day siege.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Olivia Jordan.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.