Exactly one hundred years ago, television was still just a blurred technological promise. On January 26, 1926, in a laboratory in Soho in London, John Logie Baird nevertheless carried out what is today considered the first functional public demonstration of a television system. Facing a few scientists and journalists, he managed to transmit and reproduce recognizable animated images, in real time, remotely.
The scene is far from current standards
The image is tiny, blurry, black and white, and based on a mechanical process using a rotating perforated disk, inspired by the work of the German physicist Paul Gottlieb Nipkow at the end of the 19th century. But for the first time, the fundamental principle of television is demonstrated publicly: capturing an image, transforming it into a signal, transmitting it, then reconstructing it elsewhere.
It is important to remember that television was not invented in a single day, nor by a single man. Since the 1880s, researchers and engineers have been working on remote image transmission. Baird himself is part of a long chain of innovations. But his demonstration in 1926 is landmark, because it proves that the concept really works, beyond theoretical diagrams and isolated experiments.
Baird’s television, however, remains a transitional technology. From the 1930s, mechanical systems were quickly supplanted by electronic television, supported in particular by Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin. More stable, more precise, this approach paves the way for large-scale distribution. The first regular broadcasts appeared in the United Kingdom, Germany, then the United States, before television sets gradually entered homes after the Second World War.
A century after that first shaky image, television has become an object unrecognizable from its origins. From cathode ray screens to OLED and Mini-LED panels, from terrestrial broadcasting to on-demand streaming, it has absorbed successive technological revolutions without ever disappearing. Better yet, in this age of fragmented platforms and content, the television often remains the central screen in the living room!
This centenary is therefore not only a symbolic anniversary, but it reminds us that television, often announced as outdated, was born from a major technological breakthrough and has continued, for 100 years, to reinvent itself. A rare longevity in the history of consumer technologies, for an invention which, in 1926, was still in a dark laboratory in London.
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