Full name: John Logie Baird Born: 14th August 1888 Invention/Achievement:The Television Date of introduction/Achievement: 26th January 1926, first demonstration of true television Died: 14th June 1946

John Logie Baird was a true pioneer of television and created what we know and take for granted today.  

He invented the world's first mechanical television, made the first public demonstration of colour television and produced the first purely electronic colour television picture tube.  

Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, the youngest child of a Church of Scotland minister and his wife.  

He suffered from ill health most of his life, but from a young age he showed signs of his inventive ingenuity, setting up a telephone connection with his friends in the locality.  He also thrived in pioneering work on the transmission of still and moving images.  

In 1923 Baird moved to Hastings on England's south coast, where in 1924 he put together a somewhat Heath Robinson machine made of an old hat box, a tea chest, cycle lamp lenses and various other odds and ends.  With this contraption, however, Baird transmitted moving silhouette images.  

Later that year he moved to Soho, London and, starting on 25^th March 1925, at the Selfridges store made the first of a series of public demonstrations of moving silhouette images.

 In October 1925 Baird transmitted the first television pictures with a greyscale image.  In 1927 he transmitted a television signal from London to Glasgow, across 438 miles of telephone wire.  

In 1928 he broadcast more images from London to New York and also carried out the world's first colour television transmission.  The following years saw rapid development in the technology and application of Baird's television system.  

After trials, the BBC dropped Baird's electro-mechanical system in favour of an electronic system.  Baird continued to make a significant contribution to electronic television, and in 1941 he demonstrated and patented a system for three dimensional television.  

In 1943 he persuaded the Hankey Committee, appointed to oversee the resumption of television broadcasting post-war, to adopt his advanced 1,000 line Telechrome electronic colour broadcasting system.  This would have offered picture quality similar to today's HD systems.  However, post war austerity dictated the retention of the 405 line system until 1986.  

Still plagued by ill health, John Logie Baird lived the last two years of his life at Bexhill-on-Sea, where he died on 14^th June 1946, aged just 57.