John Logie Baird FRSE was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated his working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system, and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.
John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, the first man to televise pictures of objects in motion and known asThe Father of Television’ . .John Logie Baird was born on 14 August 1888 in Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland, the son of a clergyman. Dogged by ill health for most of his life, he nonetheless showed early signs of ingenuity, rigging up a telephone exchange to connect his bedroom to those of his friends across the street. His studies at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College were interrupted by the outbreak of World War One. Rejected as unfit for the forces, he served as superintendent engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. When the war ended he set himself up in business, with mixed results.
Baird then moved to the south coast of England and applied himself to creating a television, a dream of many scientists for decades.
He produced televised objects in outline in 1924, transmitted recognizable human faces in 1925, and demonstrated the televising of moving objects in 1926 at the Royal Institution, London. The German post office gave him facilities to develop a television service in 1929. When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television service began in 1936, his system was in competition with one promoted by Marconi Electric and Musical Industries, and in February 1937 the BBC adopted the Marconi EMI system exclusively. Baird demonstrated colour television in 1928 and was reported to have completed his research on stereoscopic television in 1946. During the Second World War, Baird continued to fund his own research. His achievements included high-definition colour and 3D television, and a system for sending messages very rapidly as television images.