Episode Details

In the early 1920s, a ragged inventor walked into the Daily Express claiming he could transmit vision through the air, and the news editor hid, calling him a lunatic. That man was John Logie Baird, the Scottish engineer who built a working television from a hat box, darning needles, bicycle lamp lenses and a tea chest, surviving a 1,000-volt shock along the way.

This episode traces Baird from his Helensburg childhood and failed inventions like the glass razor and pneumatic shoes, through the Nipkow disk, the Stooky Bill dummy, and the 1926 Royal Institution demonstration, to transatlantic broadcasts, the 1936 BBC format war against EMI-Marconi, the Crystal Palace fire, and his later Telechrome color tube and Phonovision experiments.

• Why Baird's first televised subject was a ventriloquist's dummy instead of a human face
• How the Nipkow disk and photoelectric cells turned light into a scanning electrical signal
• The 1936 BBC trial: Baird's 240-line mechanical system versus the 405-line Emitron electronic camera
• The Telechrome, a 1944 fully electronic color display, and his 1,000-line color proposal
• Phonovision, Noctovision, and the debate over his 1926 radio-reflection patent and radar