John Logie BairdThe Scot Who Gave the World Television — in Black, White and Colour

In early 1923, ill and short of money, Baird moved to Hastings and began assembling the world's first working television apparatus from improvised materials — an old tea chest as a base, a disc cut from a hat box, lenses from bicycle headlamps, a biscuit tin to house the lamp, plus glue, string and sealing wax. He electrocuted himself twice and was evicted by his landlord. He moved to two attic rooms at 22 Frith Street in Soho, London (today the Bar Italia café, marked with commemorative plaques).

From late March 1925 he demonstrated moving silhouette images at Selfridges department store. But silhouettes were not television. The breakthrough came on Friday 2 October 1925. The image of the dummy's head "suddenly showed up on the screen not as a mere smudge of black and white but as a real image with details and graduations of light and shade." Baird dashed downstairs and grabbed 20-year-old office worker William Edward Taynton — the first living human being to be televised in a full range of light and shade. By some accounts Taynton received the first-ever television appearance fee: half a crown.

The decisive public moment came on 26 January 1926, when Baird invited 40 members of the Royal Institution and a Times reporter to his cramped Frith Street laboratory. The Times, reporting two days later, noted the image was "faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the 'Televisor'… it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face." This is generally accepted as the world's first public demonstration of a working television system.

On 3 July 1928, Baird gave the world's first demonstration of colour television at his Long Acre laboratory in London. His method used the same spinning-disc scanning principle, but with colour filters — red, green and blue — fitted over alternate apertures of the disc. Three sets of filters scanned the scene in three colour channels simultaneously; at the receiving end, a matching set of filters and a neon lamp reconstituted the image in colour. The system was primitive by modern standards — the colours were vivid but the picture small and flickering — but the principle was proven: you could transmit colour images over a wire or through the air.

This was not the last word in Baird's colour work. In 1944, in what is often called his most impressive achievement, he demonstrated a fully electronic colour television system at the Dorchester Hotel in London — a 600-line colour picture in a darkened room before an invited audience that included government representatives and scientists. This high-definition colour demonstration was years ahead of any rival system. He died in 1946 before seeing colour broadcasting become a commercial reality, but the principle he had first demonstrated in 1928 underpinned all that followed.

Baird married South African concert pianist Margaret Albu in New York on 13 November 1931; she was 19 years his junior. (He was famously tone-deaf — an irony for a man married to a concert pianist.) The couple had two children, Diana and Malcolm. His health, fragile all his life, finally failed; he suffered a stroke in February 1946 and died at his home in Bexhill-on-Sea on 14 June 1946, aged 57 — just one week after the BBC television service resumed its post-war broadcasts on 7 June 1946.

His legacy is worldwide. In Helensburgh a bronze bust on the West Clyde Street seafront, sculpted by Donald Gilbert, honours the "native of this town, inventor of television." Australia's prestigious television "Logie Awards" are named after him. He was ranked No. 44 in the BBC's 2002 "100 Greatest Britons" poll, inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2015, and in 2021 the Royal Mint issued a commemorative 50p coin marking the 75th anniversary of his death. The global television and video market his medium spawned is projected at US$731.24 billion in 2025 (Statista) — not bad for a sickly minister's son from the Clyde coast, working in a Soho attic with a hat box and some darning needles.