How it began
John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor and electrical engineer, gave a public demonstration of moving silhouette images at Selfridges department store in London over three weeks beginning on 25 March 1925. On 26 January 1926 he showed true television images to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation.
How it works
Baird called his machine a televisor. It used a spinning disc fitted with lenses to capture a scene and to display it again as a moving image. The picture was rough, flickering and of low resolution, but it could show recognizable human faces. Because the apparatus was large, demonstrations from early 1926 were mostly confined to his laboratories.
Who pushed back
Those who attended the January 1926 demonstration were largely unimpressed, and their later recollections did not treat the event as significant. Many early skeptics doubted that the technology was viable. Only in the following years was the Frith Street demonstration identified, in retrospect, as the point at which television passed from an idea to a practical reality. Baird also faced persistent financial struggles.
What lasted
In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission. Baird went on to demonstrate color television and stereoscopic television and later worked on fully electronic color systems. His early successes and his part in introducing broadcast television for home entertainment gave him a prominent place in the history of the medium.
Where it stands today
In 2017 the IEEE unveiled a bronze street plaque at 22 Frith Street dedicated to Baird and the invention of television, and a blue plaque also marks the site. The centenary of the demonstration was marked in January 2026, when a university team rebuilt Baird's original apparatus.
