The grandson of John Logie Baird visited Helensburgh last week, as preparations to mark 100 years of the television were stepped up.
Iain Logie Baird, who was brought up in Canada but now lives in Yorkshire, visited his grandfather’s hometown as part of a project celebrating the invention of the television.
In 2025, it will be a century since the first pictures were transmitted by Logie Baird, with the Baird TV Centenary Trust working to create an exhibition - and special visual feature at Helensburgh Submarine Centre.
And Iain said that preserving his grandfather’s legacy was a key component to the plans.
He said: “The exhibition will feature various objects that would come from all across the UK as well as internationally.
“It will cover the history of John Logie Baird and his role in influencing television as a technology and a medium.
“At the Scottish Submarine Centre we are working to create a project on the multiscreen facility there.
“It will illustrate his history and we’ll show footage of early television that has never been seen or only previously been available in a very grainy form.
“We’re trying to access the actual films to produce something of around 30 minutes that will be really special.
“The invention of television has become a bit cloudy. Various other names have come forward, like Philo Farnsworth or Vladimir Zworykin.
“So we are making sure that everyone knows that John Logie Baird was the first person to get a picture.
“Pretty much every historian of television agrees on that. But, for some reason, that message has become clouded in general knowledge.
“We’re going to have an exhibition that features several objects that have never been put on display before.
“We’ll cover his entire life; from his birth in Helensburgh in 1888 to the schools he went to, working in Glasgow and studying at Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow.
“October 2, 1925 was when he first saw Stooky Bill, his test dummy.
“The other anniversary of note was the world’s first public demonstration of a working television system on January 26 1926.
“There had been demonstrations before that. But nothing had provided a true image of a human face where you could actually recognise the person.
“For my grandfather that was the definition of television.
“To ensure it wasn’t marginalised as trickery he invented the most prominent scientists he could to come to his quite basic laboratory in London.”
With an estimated 17.2 billion television sets in the world, Iain believes that his grandfather would be delighted at the ease of access to programming that we now all take for granted.
He continued: “One of the things he used to think of television was that it would be a way of keeping peace across the nations.
“People would not only be able to hear each other, but also see each other. And that would help them to appreciate the other’s point-of-view.
“That was something he spoke about in the early 1930s.
“The other thing he’d say about TV is that he felt it should be for everyone. He didn’t just want the wealthy to have a TV set, which was very much the case until the 1950s.
“He tried to produce television systems for everyone. Whether that was cinema televisions where you’d just need to buy a ticket, or a very inexpensive TV set for personal use.”
Having grown up more than 3000 miles away from Helesburgh in Canada, Iain admits it was a school playground conversation as a youngster that made him realise how significant his grandfather’s achievements were.
He continued: “I had a few clues when I was growing up with photographs around the house, things my father said and people calling the house. I now know they were people who worked with him.
“I was a young child answering the phone in Canada to these people looking for my father in a British or American accent.
“It really hit me when I was in the schoolyard. One of the other children had read an encyclopaedia, he came up to me and said ‘by the way, did you know that your grandfather invented television.’
“I had some indication of it, but I didn’t realise my friends in Canada would know. It was quite a surprise.
“Everyone likes to look back at their family history. But to have someone who invented world changing technology is a bit hard to fully comprehend.”
