The First Television You Could Buy Had a Picture the Size of a Stamp

Last weekend, on October 24 and 25, a coffee bar in Soho filled up with people celebrating a hundred years of television. The bar was Bar Italia, at 22 Frith Street, and the occasion was a centenary event staged by the television maker Hisense, with John Logie Baird's grandson, Iain Logie Baird, there on the Sunday. The address is the point. At No. 22, in 1926, Baird showed the first true moving television pictures to an audience.

What he showed them would barely count as a picture now. The set that came out of it, the Baird Televisor, was the first television receiver sold to the public, and its screen was about the size of a postage stamp. It is worth looking at closely, because almost nothing about it survived into the television in your living room, except the idea.

The man in the attic

Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, on August 13, 1888. According to his Wikipedia biography, he moved to Hastings in early 1923 for his health and built an early television apparatus there from whatever was at hand. In July 1924 he survived a 1,000 volt electric shock.

His system was mechanical. It rested on a scanning disc that Paul Nipkow had patented in 1884, a spinning disc punched with a spiral of holes, each hole tracing one line of the picture as it passed. Baird showed moving silhouettes at Selfridges in London in March 1925. On October 2, 1925, he got his first image with real shades of grey, the head of a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill, at 32 lines and five pictures a second.

Then, on January 26, 1926, came Frith Street. Baird demonstrated moving television images to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. The picture ran at five frames a second, and Wikipedia notes that he raised it to 12.5 around 1927.

A box for the living room

Baird moved fast after that. He sent pictures over 438 miles of telephone line from London to Glasgow in 1927 and across the Atlantic in 1928, the same year he showed colour. In 1929 the BBC began transmitting programmes using his 30 line system, a service that ran until 1935.

Something had to receive those programmes, and that was the Televisor. Radiomuseum dates the Plessey Televisor to 1930, built in Ilford under licence from Baird. Inside was a Nipkow disc driven by an electric motor. Radiomuseum records 30 vertical lines at 12.5 frames per second, and an orange picture about 6 by 2 centimeters. The set had no sound output of its own.

The Early Television Museum, which has one working again with a modern LED in place of its original neon lamp, describes the set as about three feet wide and two feet high. It also notes a small trick in the disc. The three lines at each edge are spaced further apart than the ones in the middle, which makes the picture look wider than it is.

What it cost, and who bought one

Sources disagree on the price. The Early Television Museum gives about 26 pounds. Radiomuseum lists 18 pounds in the first year. The Science Museum Group, which holds a Plessey disc model, says the earliest Baird sets had mahogany cabinets and were very expensive, and that this later model, designed by the Plessey engineer Percy Packman, sold for much less.

They do agree on the numbers. Both the Science Museum Group and Radiomuseum put production at about a thousand sets. The museum adds that do it yourself kits for the same 30 line system were cheaper and more popular. Early television was a hobbyist's world, in the same way that early hi fi was, long before it became the furniture we covered in our history of Bang and Olufsen.

Thirty lines, by our arithmetic

The Televisor makes more sense next to what came after it. The line counts below come from Baird's biography and the broadcast standards that replaced his system. The ratios are our own arithmetic.

Size tells the same story. Radiomuseum's 6 by 2 centimeter picture works out at 12 square centimeters. A 65 inch screen in today's 16 by 9 shape is roughly 144 by 81 centimeters, or about 11,600 square centimeters. That is close to a thousand times the area of the Televisor's picture.

Where the disc lost

Baird's mechanical system did not last. On November 2, 1936, the BBC began alternating broadcasts at Alexandra Palace between Baird's 240 line system and EMI's 405 line electronic one. Later that year a fire destroyed Baird's facilities at Crystal Palace, and in February 1937 the BBC dropped his system for good. Wikipedia puts it down partly to the fire and partly to Baird cameras that were hard to move around.

Baird kept working. He showed hybrid colour in 1939, demonstrated 3D television at 500 lines in 1941, and in August 1944 gave the first demonstration of a practical fully electronic colour display. He died in Bexhill-on-Sea on June 14, 1946.

Seeing one

The Science Museum Group's Plessey Televisor is in the Sound and Vision galleries at the National Science and Media Museum, and the museum suggests checking ahead that it is on display before you go. In London, Frith Street is a short walk from the shops in our Soho and Dover Street Market guide. Stand outside No. 22 and look up. For more machines that changed how we watch and listen, see our histories of the Sony Walkman, the Technics SL-1200 and the whole Tech section.