A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DThe Man Who Invented TV by Jeremy Taylor
In Trinidad, they called him an obeah man, a dealer in supernatural forces. Not surprisingly. He was a strange-looking white man from Britain, with blue eyes and an intense expression and a mop of fair hair, and he had settled down in a wooden overseer's bungalow on a cocoa estate some miles outside Port of Spain. That was unusual enough back in 1920. He said he was making jams and preserves, orange marmalade and guava jelly; that was an odd occupation for an expatriate 70 years ago. But it was the other things that really unnerved the people of the quiet Santa Cruz valley. The strange lights flashing at night from the overseer's bungalow, the weird noises. The man must be working magic. One night, things came to a head and there was a confrontation which entered local folklore. A crowd gathered outside the wooden bungalow, torches flaring in the dark, and there were loud insults, demands for the obeah to stop. Stones were thrown, and clods of earth. The jam-maker, being a hot-tempered and impetuous Scot, rushed out, stood his ground, and started hurling the missiles back. He was not a man to be easily dissuaded. John Logie Baird was already used to suspicion and hostility. By the time he died in 1946, he had produced a string of major inventions, each of them surrounded by controversy. He had developed the first working television; he had invented colour television, three-dimensional television, and had pioneered basic television techniques such as outside broadcasting and video recording. He had invented the first working radar, and had developed the technology that would grow into fibre optics. He had shown how to use television for high-speed facsimile transmission, a technology which had vital applications in the Second World War. When Baird came to Trinidad in late 1919, he was nearly 31, and was escaping from the harsh Scottish climate that was plaguing him with colds and fevers and bronchial infections. He was at a crucial point in his career. For years he had been dreaming about television, the technique of "seeing by telephone"; if sound could be transmitted over long distances, why not images? Television had been a dream for a hundred years already, and much of the basic technology was in place. Scientists understood the light-sensitive properties of selenium, which would allow it to function as the visual equivalent of the radio microphone; there was an understanding of electro-magnetic waves. Telegraph systems had been in use for a hundred years, and there were working if rudimentary telex and facsimile systems; the cathode ray tube and the triode valve were available. Other inventors had found ways of scanning images using revolving discs. Researchers in St Petersburg had combined mechanical scanning with cathode ray tubes, and had hinted at the first real television; others in a dozen countries were racing for a working model. But the technology was still rudimentary, the concept remained theoretical; nobody could figure out how to make television actually work. Baird thought he knew how, and the answers were in his mind when he landed in Trinidad. The son of a Scottish minister, Baird was a compulsive innovator. As a boy he had set up a telephone exchange and electrical supply system in his father's manse, even entangling passing traffic in the wires. While working as an electrical engineer in Scotland, he had invented an unsuccessful cure for piles and had made a good deal of money out of marketing damp-proof socks for cold Scottish feet. He had blacked out half of Glasgow while trying to manufacture a diamond. But his commercial inventions were simply fund-raisers for the work that obsessed him: producing the first working television. Back in Glasgow he had already made progress in producing crude pictures and transmitting them from one room to another. He had sailed to Trinidad on the recommendation of an old school friend, hoping to raise some more money trading in cotton and safety pins. He stayed at the Ice House Hotel in Port of Spain, then at the Columbia Guest House. Nobody wanted his safety pins, so he hit on the idea of turning the island's abundant fruit into marketable products. He settled in a simple wooden house on the Stollmeyer estate in the Santa Cruz valley, studied cook-books, hired helpers, and set to work. His giant copper cauldron, formerly a washtub, could hold 112 pounds of fruit, and he suspended it over a brick fireplace, stirring frantically in the heat. The business was doomed. The boiling fruit attracted every wasp and bee and hornet and marching ant in Santa Cruz; insects dived to blissful extinction in the bubbling cauldron, and turned up entombed in the bottles of preserve. The inventive Baird built water-filled moats and kept wood smouldering, but it was no use, and after a while the fever started to reclaim him. But at night, he was busy with other things. Baird was always a secretive man, and the last thing he wanted was to let his many competitors know what he was up to. But his most recent biographers, quoting eye-witnesses including one who worked with the Stollmeyer estate at the time, claim that Baird made his basic breakthrough in television during those nine months in Santa Cruz. One witness "saw a picture transmitted from the Stollmeyer house to the overseer's house where Baird lived, a distance of a few hundred feet". Cables were used, and there was no sound, but the pictures, though hazy, showed "recognisable" faces. Back in Britain, it was another four years before Baird was ready to make his breakthrough public, and he fostered the idea that it had come to him suddenly in Hastings in 1923, glossing over the long years of experimenting. Fund-raising continued - Australian honey, horticultural goods, yellow soap, non-rust razor-blades, pneumatic shoes - and in 1925 Baird made his first public demonstration of television, in Selfridges' store in London, followed by a demonstration to selected guests, scientists and a reporter from the Times in early 1926. The Times conceded that the image produced by Baird's Televisor, though "faint and often blurred", showed that he could transmit live pictures with enough detail to show "such things as the play of expression on the face''. Soon, Baird was transmitting over long distances - London to Glasgow, Berlin to London, across the Atlantic - and was producing the first colour pictures and the first rudimentary video recordings. He developed a system for televising onto large cinema screens, and covered the 1931 and 1932 Derbys live; in 1930 he transmitted the first TV play. For many years after his death, it was assumed that by the mid-1930's Baird's day was done. His mechanical TV technology was being overshadowed by the all-electronic technology developed in the United States by Marconi-EMI; the rival system was chosen in 1936 as the basis for TV development in Britain; and the disastrous fire at Crystal Palace in south London in 1936, where Baird's research and production was based, virtually wiped him out. He faded into oblivion, a colourful pioneer swiftly left behind by advancing technology. But the most recent biography of Baird claims that much of this is illusion. In The Secret Life of John Logie Baird (Hutchinson, London, 1986), journalist Tom McArthur and mechanical engineer Peter Waddell argue that what really interested governments all over the world was not the entertainment or commercial value of television, but its military application. Far from dropping out of sight, they argue, Baird was secretly working on new uses for television which had a profound impact on the Second World War. They even claim that the 1936 Crystal Palace fire was the work of Nazi Germany, intended to destroy Baird's work. Officially, radar was invented by Sir Robert Watson-Watt in 1935. But Baird had been experimenting with a large metal dish and a receiving screen back in 1923, soon after his return from Trinidad. By 1926 he had developed a system called Noctovision, which used infra-red light to detect objects - he startled London by lighting up Nelson's Column in fog and tracking planes through cloud. It now looks as if Baird was quietly co-opted by the military as early as the 1920s, developed his Noctovision system to use radio waves instead of infra-red light, and produced the basic technology for radar long before its official "invention". It looks as if he had a good deal to do with the chain of radar stations built along Britain's vulnerable coasts in preparation for war as early as 1935; with the radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns that appeared around London in 1940; with the H2S system which guided high-flying bombers to their targets while flying above cloud; and with high-speed wartime signalling techniques which used television for facsimile transmission of maps and written material without interception. "No comment", the British Ministry of Defence told an enquirer in 1984; "much of his work is still classified." Baird's health finally gave way, and he died in June 1946, soon after televising the Victory Parade in London. He had been back in Trinidad at least once, this time in a very different role from his jam-making days. Baird was seen in Port of Spain for several weeks in 1943, dressed in military khaki drills, but without badges or insignia. The battle for the Atlantic was at its height; Trinidad was an assembly point for trans-Atlantic oil convoys, and the battle against the German submarines which preyed on them was being won, largely through improved methods of detection and radar surveillance. Nobody knows for sure what Baird was up to. But it looks as if the breakthrough he had made in quiet Santa Cruz 23 years earlier had travelled far and was now being deployed in defence of Trinidad's lumbering convoys and the western world's struggle against Nazi Germany.
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