Day: October 16, 2025

Speaker and Probus Club member, Gareth Lewis, outlined the development of a subject deeply affecting our lives: that of television.

Where did it come from? Was it invented? Did it happen by accident? The concept of transmitting sound, let alone pictures by wire, was beyond the imaginations of the greatest minds in preceding years.

Although considered by many that television was simply ‘invented’ in this country by Scotsman John Logie Baird, there were many scientists before him in the 18^th and 19^th centuries whose developments paved the way that ultimately resulted in electronic television.

Italian Volta, in 1799, created the first battery. Using this invisible force of electricity Sir Humphrey Davy, inventor of the miners’ safety lamp, created the first arc lamp. In 1896, William Crookes developed the cathode ray tube to show that cathode rays could travel through space in straight lines causing residual gasses to glow. This was further developed by Ferdinand Braun in Germany with his phosphor-coated display tube which laid the groundwork for electronic imaging.

The brilliance at Cambridge University of JJ Thomson (Nobel Physics Prize recipient in 1906) further developed the tube, causing a “beam” of rays to be controlled. Several of his students and later his son all won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Early in the 1900s, Archibald Campbell Simpson, a British Theoretical Scientist, published a paper proposing a ‘scanning system’ that would eventually form the basis of transmitting an image.

Baird used this electro-mechanical scanning method to develop the first transmission by wire from one room to another of the image of the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The British Government recognised the potential of such a system and funded its development.

It was the development of wireless transmissions following inventions by Marconi that the GPO became involved with the early radio broadcasts in 1906.

The British Broadcasting Company was formed 1922 as a trade body for the radio industry. It was converted in 1926 into The British Broadcasting Corporation and financed by a radio licence. Under government direction, the BBC played a pivotal role in bringing into existence the TV system using studios.

It will soon be 100 years since the Baird system of transmission using a scanning disk was first broadcast. The Baird Televisor sets sold to affluent Londoners were made by the Plessey Company and cost the equivalent of several year’s earning of the average man.

Meanwhile, in America, Philo Farnswoth, firstly at Westinghouse and then at RCA, in cooperation with Russian émigré Mr Zworykin, developed the first electronic practical TV camera tube, the Iconoscope. This was further developed by a British Russian scientist, Isaac Schoenberg at the EMI laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex, into a more robust and usable camera tube, the CPS Emitron. The first ‘High-Definition TV system” was in development.

Guided by the Government, in 1937 the BBC trialed both the mechanical Baird and the EMI electronic transmission systems eventually settling on the EMI/Marconi version that was able to provide an image consisting of 405 lines – the world’s first high-definition television.

Public television broadcasting began in the London area in 1936 but ceased in September 1939 at the outbreak of WW2.

Technical advances in radar made during hostilities brought improvements in the quality of transmissions when resuming in 1946. Again, the GPO was heavily involved in building lines to enable regional broadcasting to be introduced which necessitated substantial investment.

Gareth Lewis shared several memorable experiences from his forty-one-year career in broadcast engineering, which took him to many places around the world. Starting with the BBC in 1968 he worked in the famous Television Centre at White City as a project engineer. During the ruinous year of industrial unrest in the UK 1975, he moved to South Africa to be a part of the introduction of colour television in that country.

Returning to England after several years working overseas, he joined Sony in Basingstoke and among other things, became involved with the engineers working for a little-known Australian TV mogul – Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch wanted to broadcast four channels simultaneously by satellite to the UK, and Sony was able to supply equipment that would achieve this aim, which was the start of Sky Television based in Brentford, West London.

Gareth Lewis is of the opinion that over the next few years, the days of linear broadcasting schedules of programmes may disappear. It will become normal to stream programmes to watch at leisure, as is now happening with internet provided television. Possibly then, the days of the BBC licence fee may become a thing of the past.