Sunday 26 January 2020

nipkow disks

With an improved scan-rate of twelve-and-a-half frames per second (over that of the first transmission back in October of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s head at a rate of five), Scottish engineer John Logie Baird (see previously) made the first public demonstration of his mechanical television on this day in 1926 to members of Royal Institution and reporters from his Soho workshop and studio on Frith Street.
His pioneering live video recordings—though rudimentary at first advanced at a galloping rate—and were within a year being transmitted via telephone lines with signals being broadcast across the Atlantic shortly thereafter. Baird went on to invent the first colour television and picture tube, aside from producing some of the world’s first programming.
In the summer of 1930, the BBC—with Baird’s input—selected the one-act drama by Luigi Pirandello, The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca) to be the adaptation of its first experimental telecast, the exchange between a man dying of a malignant growth in his throat (il fiore in bocca) and a relaxed business man who missed his train connection and is content to wile away his time until the next comes was chosen for its running-time of thirty minutes, small cast and lack of scene changes. As it was a live transmission, no record of the original exists.