Blue Plaque Trail:

John Logie Baird

Struggling to find a local blue plaque with a seasonal connection, the best we could come up with is Christmas and television!  But it turns out that JLB was an amazingly prolific inventor, responsible for much more than just the gogglebox in your living room...

In 1888 John Logie Baird was born in the small coastal town of Helensburgh, Argyll, one of the four children of a Presbyterian minister. After a near-fatal childhood illness he was to suffer from a ‘weak constitution’ for the rest of his life. Although he never did well at school - the lessons didn’t engage his formidable imagination - his practical, enthusiastic and determined nature made him a natural inventor. While still at school he rigged up a telephone system for communicating with his friend across the street, and then converted this to an electric lighting system for his parent’s house (the first in their town).

After leaving school Baird started a diploma in engineering but this was interrupted by WW1 and bouts of ill health, and he never took the final examinations. Rejected as unfit for military service, he began work as an electrician at a power station. Taking advantage of the facilities, he tried to make diamonds out of graphite using a powerful electrical discharge, only to plunge Glasgow into darkness. He resigned before he could be fired. There followed an unsuccessful business venture selling jam, and another more successful one selling soap, but he again fell ill.

In 1923, at the invitation of a friend, Baird moved to Hastings, like so many before him, ‘for his health’. With £200 to his name and no hope of work because of his illness, he needed to make a living and resolved ‘I must invent something’. There followed a series of successful and not-so-successful inventions, including a rustproof safety razor made from glass (forsaken after it shattered leaving him severely cut) and pneumatic-soled shoes (boots equipped with balloons - the demonstration of which resulted in ‘a succession of drunken and uncontrollable lurches followed by a few delighted urchins’).

One day, after returning to his lodgings at 21 Linton Crescent after a walk over the cliffs to Fairlight Glen, Baird announced to his friend that he’d had an idea for ‘seeing with wireless’ and set to work. He created his first successful television transmitting and receiving equipment out of a variety of items including an old tea chest, a hat box, a biscuit tin, lenses from bicycle lanterns, an old electric motor and lots of sealing wax and string. Later it was refined by the addition of some more sophisticated components, and the first successful demonstration of the equipment was in January 1924 when he transmitted and received a static picture of a Maltese cross made from cardboard across a distance of a few feet. This was the first ever television transmission, the site now marked by a blue plaque (sponsored by the Institute of Physics).

After this, Baird rented a separate workshop in Queen’s Arcade but in July 1924, while working on his ‘Televisor’ equipment, a short circuit caused an electrical explosion that blew Baird off his feet, leaving him badly shaken and with burns to his hands. Clearly the idea that Baird’s work could be dangerous didn’t agree with the landlord at the Arcade, Alderman Tree (or ‘Mr. Twig’ as Baird caustically referred to him in his
autobiography). Following an argument in the street between the two men, Baird was asked to leave. He moved from Hastings to London in November 1924.

Continuing to refine and publicise his invention, now working from Frith Street in Soho, in March 1925 Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving television images (his wiggling fingers) at Selfridges department store, and later that year successfully transmitted the first televison picture with halftones (greys) – the subject being the head of a ventriloquists’s dummy called ‘Stooky Bill’ – at the rate of five pictures per second. In 1926 demonstrated his television to members of the Royal Institution, by this time at 12.5 pictures per second and in 1928 he made the first colour transmission, and even developed a primitive video recording device. Although his mechanical television equipment was to be superseded by electronic systems and the cathode-ray-tube in the 1930s, the true forerunners of modern television systems, Baird’s genius was far from exhausted. He was to be instrumental in the development of a number of other technologies we take for granted today, including fibre-optics, infrared night vision and radar (for which his wartime contributions are only recently beginning to come to light). His poor health continued to dog him.

In December 1944 Baird moved back to this area, to No.1 Station Road in Bexhill, with his wife (a concert pianist, Margaret Albu) and two children. He was still hard at work perfecting his various innovations when he died there of a stroke in 1946, at the age of 57. When the bulldozers turned up last August, nobody was there to protest or even seemed to notice as they pulled it down his old house to make way for a new block of flats.

If you’d like to find out more, Hastings Museum have a special JL Baird exhibit with photographs, letters and models, some of which can also be seen on their website (www.hmag.org.uk).