26 January 1926 – The first demonstration of the television by the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird.

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  1. John Logie Baird (1888 – 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world’s first live 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.

    On 26 January 1926, Baird gave the first public demonstration of true television images for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London, where Bar Italia is now located.

    Baird initially used a scan rate of 5 pictures per second, improving this to 12.5 pictures per second c.1927. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation.

  2. My local pub (north London) was called The John Baird as it was near Alexandra Palace (whence the first BBC TV signals were first transmitted). I visited last month to find that the pub has been renamed some shite like ‘The Village Green’ with almost all trace of its heritage removed. The thing is, people complain a lot about Wetherspoons, but they have a pub locally that is full of local heritage and old photos to educate people about the area. It’s a shame that so much pub heritage is lost because it is such important local heritage.

  3. John Logie Baird carried at his transmission experiments at [his home](https://imgur.com/a/bhOKUaD) on the top of [Box Hill](https://imgur.com/a/Oa0gnwi) in south eastern England called ‘Swiss Cottage’ (Box Hill is also featured in Jane Austen’s book Emma and used while filming the Gwyneth Paltrow movie).

    When the BBC was looking for the best place to transmit for the 2012 Olympics road cycling event that was routed several times up and down Box Hill, they discovered that Swiss Cottage was the absolute perfect place for a signal.

  4. Why not the Soviet one? Wasn’t he “the first one to create real TV, but anglos just focused on their example”?

  5. In primary school, our teacher told us that the word “bellen” (making a phone call) comes from the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, which is absurd but it did make it easier to remember him.

    With that logic, somehow I’m disappointed that the inventor of the television isn’t named John Tele Baird or something.

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