A special thank you to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing this week's Wavescan - with an interesting tie-in to radio !
Partially sourced from:
https://theconversation.com/the-transatlantic-race-to-create-the-television-258726
Published June 12, 2025
Jeff: We don’t often talk about television on Wavescan, but there’s a very interesting story of how it was first developed back in the 1920’s and 30’s, and it does include radio. Various countries lay claim to the invention, but what was the reality? Here’s Ray Robinson in Los Angeles, who has been uncovering the truth.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, when I was growing up in England, we were always taught that Scotsman John Logie Baird had been the inventor of television. I was quite surprised when, in my 20’s at work, I met a Russian co-worker who insisted it had been a Russian. And then when we came to the States in the 1980’s, I found that people here thought it was an American – either Charles Francis Jenkins (who I hadn’t heard of before), or Philo Farnsworth (who I had). So, what was the true story? It turns out it was a mixture of all of them, plus a number of others! In fact, it became something of a race. Let me explain.
Number 1519 Connecticut Avenue lies just north of Dupont Circle, about a 20-minute walk from the White House in Washington, DC. In 1921, the inventor Charles Francis Jenkins set up his laboratory and offices there, upstairs from a car dealership.
Today there are no obvious external indications of this famous resident, nor of his exceptional achievements, awards and numerous patents. Just over 100 years ago at his laboratory, on June 13, 1925, Jenkins gave a demonstration of a televised film sent by radio waves from a building about 4 miles away in what is now the US Naval Research Laboratory in Bellevue, on the southern outskirts of the District of Columbia.
The invited group of mostly government officials included the secretary of the Navy, Curtis D. Wilbur. They watched with fascination a film that showed a silhouette of a toy windmill with its blades in motion. The television picture comprised 48 lines, refreshed at the silent-movie rate of 16 frames per second.
By July 1925, Jenkins had demonstrated vision and sound transmitted together on a single short-wave radio frequency. The published technical details indicate a high degree of sophistication in his designs, as might be expected from someone with a background in precision phototelegraphy (the transmission of images over wires). In the early 1920’s he had developed a practical means of sending images of weather charts by radio to ships at sea. It was this phototelegraphy work that led him into experiments in televising silhouettes of live and filmed scenes.
Parallel development
But, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird beat him to become the first to perform a public demonstration of a similar mechanical television system, in London, over three weeks in March and April 1925. Baird, who had been working on the technology since early 1923, showed live moving images in reflected light transmitted by radio to enthusiastic crowds in Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London’s West End. With only eight lines per picture, he carefully chose simple objects that would be easily identifiable.
For the demonstration, he had built a television studio in Covent Garden, less than half a mile away, and experimented with a small transmitter. By January of the following year, 1926, he gained widespread recognition for being able to demonstrate 30-line television showing recognizable facial features in reflected light.
But in order to gain more funding which would require the sale of television receivers, he soon realized he needed a much more powerful transmitter to broadcast his programs. The BBC had such a transmitter, 2LO, which was conveniently located on the roof of Selfridges. 2LO was used for daily 'wireless' programs, but the BBC service closed down in the evening at about 11pm and often didn’t re-start until mid-morning. So, Baird approached the BBC for permission to use the transmitter during the overnight periods. Eventually the BBC reluctantly agreed, and by the end of 1929 Baird was running a program of regular television broadcasts which would continue for the next six years. Unfortunately, at first the BBC only had the one transmitter (for television you need two; one for the picture and one for the sound). It meant that for the first six months, television programs comprised two minutes of picture, followed by two minutes of sound and so on. By March 1930 the BBC had opened a second radio transmitter, and so simultaneous sound and picture transmissions began.
In the United States, meanwhile, Jenkins had doubled down on improving the image quality for his demonstration. He launched his silent silhouette video service for hobbyists on radio station W3XK in July 1928, around the same time as similar offerings from companies that included General Electric (GE) and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). By the end of 1928, there were thought to have been as many as 15 experimental television stations operating in the United States.
Like Baird’s and Jenkins’ methods, many of these early stations relied on mechanically rotating disks with patterns of holes to scan images line by line. They were all very low on detail, but were still heralded as proof of concept for television. A key factor in their acceptance was the uncanny ability of human vision to recognize facial expressions along with natural body motion in poor quality images.
Back in the UK in 1928, Baird went on to demonstrate color television, early 3D stereoscopic television, and transatlantic television all for the first time, though more as a way of attracting financial backing than presenting prototypes of future offerings.
What came next
But, those mechanical systems were short-lived.
Many scientists and engineers felt that mechanical television, using spinning discs, was not the answer to television. They felt that the answer lay in a form of electronic television and its champions were: Vladimir Zworykin at RCA in the USA; Isaac Shoenberg's team at EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) in the UK; and a fourteen-year-old farm boy from Idaho called Philo Farnsworth.
It took Farnsworth six years to take his system from first ideas to prototype – and by 1929 he was the first to demonstrate a complete electronic television system with no moving parts. But he was soon overtaken by other inventors and faded from the scene.
RCA and EMI focused their respective resources on developing vastly superior electronic television systems. These scanned and reproduced images using electron beams that are fired inside a cathode ray tube to capture and show the transmitted moving picture on the screens of people’s TV sets. Those pictures had
around 100 times the information content of the earlier mechanical systems, and they used ideas from scientists such as Boris Rosing in Russia and Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton in the UK.
Sadly, Charles Jenkins didn’t live to see those new electronic systems. His health began deteriorating in late 1930, and he died in 1934 aged 66, leaving behind a superb legacy of a career in inventions.
In the summer of 1934, the British government set up a committee, chaired by Lord Selsdon, to investigate the possibility of providing a high-definition television service to replace the low-definition 30-line transmissions already taking place. At that time Baird's improved mechanical television system had had the benefit of nearly ten years of development since its invention whilst the EMI electronic system was still in its infancy.
The picture quality of the two systems at that time was similar, and so the Selsdon committee recommended that 'two television systems of High-Definition Television should be tried at the London Station'. The London Station was to be built and operated by the BBC, and the two systems (Baird and EMI) would broadcast on alternate weeks for a trial period of six months. The government defined High-Definition as 'not having less than 240 lines per picture' and Baird set to work to increase his system to meet the 240 line threshold.
At EMI, Isaac Shoenberg took the courageous decision to develop an electronic system which had 405 lines. This leap of faith, based on advice from his research team (over 60 strong), would have financially ruined the company had it failed.
The Baird Company set to work to design and build all the equipment for a complete television station, including the transmitters. EMI on the other hand felt that they didn't have the expertise in transmitter design, but they knew a man who did - Guglielmo Marconi - so a new company, Marconi-EMI, was formed to deliver the entire electronic station.
Alexandra Palace
Meanwhile the BBC, tasked with providing a suitable building complete with the studios, sound transmitter, mast and aerials - all within 18 months - began a frantic search for a suitable site. Alexandra Palace, a run-down Victorian entertainment complex in North London, was not their first choice. However it had a couple of significant advantages:
1) part of it was available for rent, and
2) it was on top of a hill.
The BBC knew that it was vital to get the transmitting aerials as high as possible. Calculations showed that to get a reliable range of 25 miles reception with a 34 kW transmitter in VHF band 1, the aerial had to be about 600 feet (180 metres) above sea level. Alexandra Palace was already half that, so the transmitting tower only needed to be another 300 feet (90 metres) tall.
The summer of 1936 saw a hive of activity as everyone worked frantically towards the official opening date of early November - but all that was about to change.
Olympia Broadcast
The 1936 Radio Show at Olympia, in London was scheduled for the end of August. RadiOlympia was an annual exhibition put on by the Radio Manufacturers' Association, and a number of the exhibitors were displaying new television sets. Concerned that there would be no programs to display on them at the show, the BBC came under pressure to provide demonstration transmissions during August. A variety show was quickly put together called 'Here's Looking at You', and it went out twice a day for two weeks, with the two competing television systems alternating on a daily basis.
BBC Television formally opened a regularly scheduled service on 2 November 1936 at 3pm, with speeches by the Postmaster General, the Chairman of the BBC, and Lord Selsdon. The opening ceremony actually took place twice; first (on the toss of a coin) in front of the Baird cameras, and then again with the Marconi-EMI system. In this way, BBC television's second programme was also its first repeat. The first program following the official opening on 2 November was a bulletin of British Movietone News. Other programs transmitted on that day included variety pieces and the first TV documentary, Television Comes to London.
The new BBC Television Service had started, and it was the first regularly scheduled true high-definition television service in the world. With the two systems alternating on a weekly basis, it was soon clear that Marconi-EMI were offering superior performance. The decision was taken to end the competition early, and after only three months the final Baird transmission went out at the end of January 1937. John Logie Baird continued to work as a TV pioneer in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, dedicated to exploring color television and cinema projection. He died in 1946 at the age of just 57.
In the USA, by the late 1930’s, RCA had developed a 441 line system which was adopted by their NBC TV network, but then in 1941, under pressure from competing technologies, the FCC formed a committee called the NTSC, which decided to standardize on a 525 line system. That of course was black and white, but a compatible standard for color television was adopted in 1953, and the first program broadcast coast-to-coast in color was the January 1st 1954 coverage on NBC of the Rose Parade from Pasadena, California.
After a short break during World War II, the British 405-line television service continued for several decades. It was supplemented in 1955 by the introduction of a commercial TV service – Independent Television, or ITV, in VHF Band 3. And that 405 line black and white system is what I grew up with in England during the 1950s and 60’s. Alongside the 405 line system, a superior quality 625 line system was introduced on UHF in 1964, and then color television using the compatible PAL standard was gradually introduced, program by program, from 1967 onwards. The 405 line black and white VHF service was finally shut down at the start of 1985, more than 48 years after it had officially been launched.
Jenkins’ and Baird’s original pioneering efforts, and the excitement they generated, are still rightly heralded by many people today. We can now only imagine how it must have felt to see moving images transmitted from miles away for the first time. It’s incredible to reflect that what was once considered magic so quickly became mundane. Back to you, Jeff.
