The Evolution of Modern British Electronics, 1930–1945

Approximately 80 years ago, on 26 January 1926, John Logie Baird demonstrated rudimentary television to about 40 members of the Royal Institution. Baird used a variant of a device known as a Nipkow scanner and was able to show a crude televised image of the head of a ventriloquist’s doll; the scanning parameters were probably 32 lines per picture and 12.5 pictures per second. When, on 30 September 1929, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reluctantly transmitted its first experimental television broadcast, the picture definition was based on 30 lines per picture, the scanning rate remaining unchanged at 12.5 images per second. These characteristics were chosen so that the low definition television broadcasts could be transmitted, using a carrier frequency in the medium waveband, to a potentially large number of viewers. Only ‘head and shoulders’ images could be transmitted and essentially the BBC was not interested in participating in the advancement of a television system which could not reproduce images of, say, a cricket Test Match at Lords or tennis at Wimbledon. The BBC felt that low definition television was inappropriate to its services; there had to be a move towards a higher definition standard. Following Baird’s 1926 success, many inventors and companies in the USA, France, Germany and elsewhere demonstrated low definition television. The most impressive demonstrations were those given by the well-endowed Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) in April 1927. Subsequently, Dr. H. E. Ives, the director of television research at BTL, in an important paper written in 1931, highlighted the difficulties which faced television workers in the late 1920s. He wrote: