William Edward Taynton was television’s first paid star – and, just like many celebrities of recent times, he was somewhat resented for what he earned.
Taynton was working as a clerk in an office at 22 Frith Street in Soho, London, when – on Friday 2nd October 1925 – a friend and upstairs neighbour suddenly appeared, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him up to the darkened attic.
Taynton was sat down in front of a disconcertingly home-made-looking contraption of blinding lights and numerous fast-spinning discs. Frightened, he refused to stay near it, until his friend grudgingly gave him a few coins before moving into the next room to check a monitor screen.
Many years later, Taynton’s friend wrote, somewhat wryly: “On the screen I saw the flickering, but clearly recognisable, image of William’s face – the first face seen by television – and he had to be bribed with 2/6 for the privilege of achieving this distinction.”
Williams friend, of course, was John Logie Baird, arguably one of the men who invented the 20th century. Nine decades after that first successful – if limited – transmission, a world without television and broadcast media is simply unimaginable.
Yet it was just such a world into which Baird himself was born, on 14th August 1888. “In those days life moved far more slowly and with much more dignity than it does today,” Baird later wrote. “There were no motor cars, no wireless sets, no aeroplanes; the telephone was a novelty possessed by a few of the more wealthy; the gramophone, a strange instrument, appeared occasionally in booths at fairs held in the village.”
It’s clear, though, that this particular son of the manse – his father was the Reverend John Baird, minister of St Bride’s Church – had his mind set on the future. A voracious reader from early childhood, he considered H G Wells “a demigod” and “the reading of any new book by him … a feast”.
However, it was a non-fiction book that “settled the matter” of his future career. The Boys’ Playbook of Science, by John Henry Pepper and T C Hepworth, included instructions on how to make a telephone with wire, nails and pill-boxes. “Telephones became my mania,” Baird said later. “I installed a small exchange in my room and wires were run over the street to the houses of four friends.”
This experiment in telephony, began when Baird was just 13 years old, came to an abrupt end after a local taxi driver was “caught round the neck” by one of Baird’s telephone wires and “thrown cursing and shouting into the gutter”.
A year or so later, however, the Helensburgh Times reported how the young Baird had installed electric light to the family home. He had bought a second-hand oil engine, and made a small dynamo which charged up a battery of accumulators made from numerous lead plates wrapped by hand in flannelette and packed into jam jars filled with sulphuric acid.
It was also around this time – 1903 – that Baird first started thinking about developing television, in part inspired by a German booklet by Ernst Ruhmer on selenium cells – which were capable of converting light into transmittable electrical impulses. Biographers Antony Kamm and Malcom Baird even consider it “a distinct possibility” that Baird had already “envisaged a complete working system” while still a student at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow (now, the University of Strathclyde).
Baird took the best part of eight years to complete his course, principally because of frequent illness, but rounded off the experience with six months’ study at the University of Glasgow in 1914. His health, at least, saved him from the horrors of the First World War; in April 1916, an Army doctor confirmed Baird “Unfit for Any Service”.
According to Baird’s daughter, Diana, his first job as an Assistant Mains Engineer for the Clyde Valley Electric Power Company could scarcely have been more unsuitable. “It consisted in being on call at any hour of the day or night – he had a phone in his lodgings – to gather his gang of navvies and trace and repair electrical faults. He got cold after cold,” she said.
Realising this job was a career dead end, Baird started looking around for opportunities to be “his own master”. Ironically enough, his first success was inspired by his own precarious health; he invented the Baird Undersock, a thin sock sprinkled with borax and worn under ordinary socks, “keeping feet warm in winter and cool in summer”.
Initially advertised in The People’s Friend, and then by using the first sandwich women to appear on the streets of Glasgow, by 1917 Baird was apparently earning in a week what he’d previously earned in a year at the Clyde Valley Power Station. It didn’t last, however; essentially a one-man concern, the business collapsed after Baird was confined to bed for six weeks.
His subsequent attempt to start a jam factory in Trinidad also failed and, returning to London in 1921, he found no one interested in his mango chutney and guava jelly – apart from a sausage maker who bought his whole stock for £15. Subsequent short-term business ventures included running a small horticultural shop, importing Australian honey, and then setting up what for a time became a successful soap company.
Continuing ill-health forced him to move out to Hastings, where he decided to focus his efforts on perfecting television. Early results proved that he was on the right track and attracted some positive attention and limited financial support, not least from wireless company and cinema owner Will Day, who brought Baird back to London after his experiments – and near self-electrocution – unsettled his Hastings landlord.
In March 1925 London’s Selfridge’s store invited Baird to demonstrate his apparatus to interested shoppers, who could look down a funnel arrangement and see outlines of shapes transmitted from a few yards away. Time and money, however, were clearly running out.
“The situation was becoming desperate and we were down to our last £30 when at last, one Friday in October 1925, everything functioned properly,” he later wrote. The image of his first subject, an old ventriloquist’s dummy called “Stooky Bill” appeared on the screen with what Baird later described as “almost unbelievable clarity”.
So he ran down to get William Taynton to provide a moving subject.
Thanks to the reticence of his business partner, Baird didn’t publicly demonstrate his television system until 26 January 1926, to nearly 50 members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. “The audience were for the most part men of vision and realised that in these tiny flickering images they were witnessing the birth of a great industry,” he wrote later, with just a little bit of hindsight.
In subsequent years Baird demonstrated colour television, 3D television, and transmit by telephone line from London to the Central Hotel in Glasgow. While the BBC would eventually abandon Baird’s system in favour of that developed by EMI-Marconi, he was nevertheless invited to help shape government policy on post-war broadcasting. He was experimenting with cinema television on the screens of Gaumont British when he died, aged just 57, on 14 June 1946.
First published in The Scots Magazine, October 2015.
