by Krishna C. Nadella
For those that had a chance to read my last submission to the NY NATAS Quarterly Newsletter, ‘AN INTERVIEW WITH HISTORY – PART 1’, you will recall that I was interviewing Dr. Malcolm Baird with regard to the accomplishments of his father, John Logie Baird, one of the inventors of the mechanical television and inventor of both the first publicly demonstrated color television system and the first purely electronic color television picture tube.
Below is Part 2 of my sit-down interview as we discuss John Logie Baird’s contributions to society, his place in history and his lasting legacy.
(Photo: Getty Images)
Krishna C. Nadella: Why is it that more of the general public cannot easily identify the inventor of the television the way they do the inventor of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell) or light bulb (Thomas Edison)?
Malcolm Baird: The general public in the UK has no difficulty in identifying the inventor of television – as
John Logie Baird. On the other hand, historical writers in the USA have tended to discount Baird. In their view, mechanical television was an aberration which was not to be taken seriously. That is rather like saying that Marconi’s radio transmission of the letter ‘S’ across the Atlantic in 1902 was an aberration because it used a primitive technology (the spark-gap transmitter) which later became obsolete.
Mechanical television was the only viable technique in January 1926 when television was first demonstrated. In February 1928 my father achieved transatlantic television, also by mechanical means, with a head-and- shoulders moving picture being transmitted from London to New York by short wave radio. This hit the headlines on both sides of the ocean; a New York Times editorial equated it with Marconi’s radio transmission of the letter ‘S’ across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, RCA was pouring money into its electronic television research program led by Zworykin, while Philo Farnsworth was getting promising results with far smaller resources. After more than 80 years, the invention of electronic television is still in dispute between Zworykin and Farnsworth. Innumerable books and articles have been written on both sides and the US public is understandably confused.
In the last few years there have been encouraging signs that my father’s work is at last being recognized in the USA. In 2014 the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) inducted J.L. Baird to their Honor Roll which already included Zworykin, Farnsworth and Thomas Edison. On 26 January 2016, the 90th anniversary of the first public demonstration of television was marked by a Google Doodle which featured an early mechanical television receiver and a picture of Baird.
(Photo: Google)
This produced 30,000 hits on the Baird television website (www.bairdtelevision.com). Most recently, on 26 January 2017, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) marked the 91st anniversary of the demonstration by unveiling a historic plaque at the demonstration site in the Soho district of London.
(Photo: English Heritage)
My son Iain joined the president of the IEEE at the event which can be seen at the following
Link: https://youtu.be/jY-3AYJ_F_Q
KCN: Recalling my last article, ‘Of Televisions and Telephones’, what are your thoughts on oral (phone) and visual (TV) communications coming together in today’s day and age?
MB: The media are in a period of rapid change. Television evolved through mechanical television to electronic television, with one or two exceptions such as telecine devices that were used for scanning movies for broadcasting. The centerpieces of electronic television were electronic vacuum tubes – the camera tube and the cathode ray tube which was a feature of every home TV set for many years. In the boom years of broadcast television (1950-2000) the industry had an immense influence. As an illustration of this, the USA’s most important job is held today by someone who rose to fame as a television personality!
Quietly, without fanfare, scientists and engineers have been changing the technology. Solid state flat screens have replaced cathode ray tubes, digital transmission has replaced analog transmission and the old limits on the number of broadcast channels have disappeared. The channel change switches on old television sets (now collectors’ items) only had 13 positions, but that no longer applies. The broadcast television industry is in a state of flux and it is merging increasingly with its former rival, the movie industry. For example, the old mechanical movie cameras that used clumsy reels of 35 mm film have been largely replaced by solid state video cameras. However there are still a few directors in the movie industry who claim that the old film technology gave better pictures. The biggest change for the individual media user is that he or she has far more direct participation and choice. Audio and video clips can be sent from one person to another at the press of a key. In systems such as Skype, television has merged with the telephone. In earlier times it was easy for a government to regulate the media because they were very centralized, but that is no longer the case. The increased freedoms of media users raise some vexed issues, one of which is security and another of which is the protection of creative copyright. Technical change is continuing and we live in interesting times.
KCN: What lessons can people take away from your father’s life story and trail-blazing experiences?
MB: Since we are talking about television, may I be allowed a commercial plug? In 1941, my father spent several months in a country health clinic, recovering from a heart attack. He used this time to dictate his memoirs. For many years the typescript remained with the family, but eventually it was published; first by the Royal Television Society (1987) and later by an Edinburgh publisher (2004) under the title “Television and Me”. For the later edition I wrote a short introduction and added footnotes which helped to clarify the text.
The book is currently out of print but some second hand copies are available on Amazon. This book is not highly technical and it gives my father’s own “take” on his life and work and motivation. It is a story of inspiration, frustration and persistence – relieved by the occasional touch of self-deprecating humor.
The lesson in my opinion is this. Today’s media are awash in information and various sorts of hype. People in entertainment, sports and politics seem to have a monopoly on the public attention that they seek. But there is another class of person that has enormous hidden influence: scientists and engineers are mostly quiet people who lack charisma and speak in technical language. Krishna, your father and my father and I all belong in that group!
KCN: Who would be in your ‘Mount Rushmore’ of inventors who made a significant global impact?
MB: My father’s home country, the UK, does not have a Mount Rushmore or anything like it.
However there is the National Portrait Gallery in London which contains paintings and sculptures of the UK’s great achievers and I am pleased to say that it contains a cast bronze bust of my father, sculpted by Donald Gilbert.
(Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London)
This was done in London in 1942, near the end of my father’s life. Several copies of the bust are also in Scotland including one that is on open display in my father’s home town of Helensburgh.
KCN: Talk to me about how you continue to provide a spotlight on your father’s work?
MB: For the last few years, my son Iain and I have been operating a website www.bairdtelevision.com which contains recent news and articles relating to J.L. Baird. It is updated every few months. The “Gallery” in the website contains historic articles, book reviews etc. The site gets about 120 hits per day worldwide, but when the “Google Doodle” appeared in January 2016 the hits went up to 30,000.
There have been many books and television documentaries, with different schools of thought about my father. Some authors have perpetuated the stereotype of Baird that he was only interested in mechanical television and they ignore his work on electronic television after 1932. Recently, there have been two books on the electronic work by my old friend Dr. Douglas Brown: “Images Across Space: The Electronic Imaging of Baird Television” (2009) and “The Three Dimensions of John Logie Baird” (2012). These books contain technical descriptions and diagrams based on Baird’s patents. I am delighted to see that the professional bodies in the USA (SMPTE and IEEE) are aware of my father’s work on electronic television.
My father’s work has been covered by the web, television and the print media, but not yet by the movie (aka film) industry. This omission may be due to the uneasy relationship between the television and movie industries, but in the last few years the two industries have converged -- as I pointed out earlier. A movie project on Philo Farnsworth came close to the production stage in 2005 and my report on this can be seen in the Gallery of the Baird website.
KCN: How would you like your father to be remembered?
MB: The answer to this one is that he is already well remembered. There are about a dozen books in existence; some are biographies and some are technical accounts of his work. As I look back over the years, I think there is scope for yet another book that looks at the social and cultural context of my father’s life, with a final chapter on the evolution of television between 1946 and the present. My father was born and raised in Scotland in the late Victorian era and subject to the strict social and religious conformity of the time.
Popular science was an inspiration to the young and it was seen as “progress”, a force for good. Then came World War I. My father volunteered for military service but he was rejected on medical grounds; had he been accepted and sent to the trenches, his story might have stopped right there. But television was achieved in 1926.
The new book could focus not only on my father’s work but also the ways in which people reacted and are still reacting to television. For example, he showed up at a newspaper office in London and told the editor about television; the editor quickly passed Baird on to their largest and toughest reporter with a quiet warning to be careful with this interviewee, who might be a lunatic. Moving on to the 1950s, I can recall that my school teachers detested television. They hated the idea of students sitting and watching a program when they could have been doing something more worthwhile, such as learning Latin or playing cricket.
(Photo: Russell A. Potter)
Krishna, thank you so much for your interesting and penetrating questions. I have enjoyed this one-on-one interview.
-Krishna C. Nadella is the Host & Producer of ‘STATE OF MIND with Krishna C. Nadella’