COLOUR USED IN TELEVISION

Southland Times, Issue 23376, 7 December 1937, Page 7

COLOUR USED IN TELEVISION

SECRET EXPERIMENTS SUCCESSFUL FILMS NOT INVOLVED IN PROCESS (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright) (Received December 6, 6.30 p.m.) LONDON, December 5. Mr J. L. Baird announces the arrival of television in colour. He explains that years of secret experiments were successful a few months ago. The process does not involve films. A Union Jack can be held before the camera and reproduced in its actual colours. John Logie Baird, the television pioneer, was born at Helensburgh, Scotland, in 1889 and educated at Larchfield, the Royal Technical College, Glasgow, and Glasgow University. His father was a minister. As a lad he devised an electric light plant worked by a water wheel, with old jam jars as accumulators. Baird was apprenticed to engineering, but early in his career began to invent things

not connected with it. I Among them were a I special kind of underIsock and a boot polish. ■He made them himself I and sold them to I Glasgow shop keepers. J After a period in | Trinidad as a jam. I maker he returned I home and dealt in I Australian honey, coirI fibre and a new varI iety of soap which he I had concocted. He was | about to form a combine with a rival maker when he fell ill

and had to go to Hastings for the sake of his health. At 34 Baird felt that his activities were at an end. But in time, though he had little money, he resumed in his small bedroom the experiments with selenium cells which he had begun as a youth. He assembled scraps of metal and wood, cardboard, broken down electric motors, a few cheap lenses and other odds and ends. With glue, sealing wax, string and a tangle of wires that rivalled a modern telephone exchange he put these things together according to a plan he had conceived. It was his first television apparatus and looked like one of Heath Robinson’s efforts. Yet, early in 1924, Baird transmitted the image of a Maltese cross over a distance of two ot three yards. His money was then exhausted, but a cinema proprietor advanced £2OO for a third share in the invention and Baird moved to London and took two small rooms in Soho. For a short period he was paid to demonstrate his invention in a large store, but when this ended he lost all aid towards improving it and was gradually reduced to abject poverty. Wherever he went to arouse interest in his invention he was regarded as a crank. The day came when he had to sell parts of his apparatus to pay rent and buy food. Friends in Scotland, only then hearing of his plight, came to his help and his experiments were resumed. HISTORIC OFFICE BOY On October 2, 1925, Baird had the greatest thrill of j his life when he put a doll before the transmitter in one room and saw its image on the receiving screen in the other. He rushed down to the office boy on the next floor and got him, rather unwillingly, to stand before the screen. This lad was thus the first person to be seen by television. Later he became an employee of Baird’s company. With improved results Baird gave a successful demonstration at the Royal Institution in January 1926.

The publicity thus obtained brought offers of assistance and, no longer hampered by lack of money, Baird made rapid progress. He chanced to meet in the Strand his former rival in the soap business. Captain Oliver Hutchinson, who became his business manager and brought fresh capital into the venture. A company with a capital of £125,000 was formed to take up the invention and when Baird gave demonstations in America he proved to be far ahead of other experimenters. In the next few years he advanced still further in quality of reproduction and distance covered. The British Broadcasting Corporation gave regular transmissions. Continually progressing, Baird combined speech with television and in March 1934 achieved the triumph of enabling the chairman of Baird Television, Limited, standing in a studio at the top of one of the towers of the Crystal Palace, to address and be seen by a meeting of shareholders in London 10 miles away. The picture was made up of 180 strips or lines, compared with 30 used for the 8.8. C. transmissions, which meant an increase in the number of "picture points” from 2000 to 48,000. The sound and vision were conveyed on wireless waves of 6 and 6.5 metres respectively. Television became possible across the Atlantic. In 1931 Baird married the pianist, Miss Margaret Albu.