Saturday, January 30,
1937 was a sad day for Scottish television pioneer John Logie Baird. That was
when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) finally abandoned its
mechanical television system, with its whirring wheels and messy chemicals. He
had come a long way since his first experiments with television in 1923, but it
wasn’t far enough. His dream was over. The future was electronic. Three months
earlier, on November 2, 1936, the BBC had started the world’s first regular,
high definition, public television broadcasting service. In alternate weeks it
used two different sets of equipment.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a lone
pioneer, Philo T. Farnsworth, had started work on his electronic “image
dissector” in 1926. He gave the first demonstration of all-electronic
television in 1934. Unfortunately, his cameras needed too much light, and his
work came to a dead end. Electronic eye the strange shape of the Emitron camera
reflected the shape of the image tube inside it.
The drooping nose held the tube’s electron gun. Above this were two lenses, one of which was a viewfinder. Pictures from Pinning disc Baird did much to create interest in television. He used a rotating disc to sweep a spotlight over the subject to be televised, with a matching disc in the receiver. This mechanical system could not make pictures good enough to compete with electronics.
