THE MEDIA - A loser who still rates highly

Packer and the Seven Network are fighting over his name, but was John Logie Baird really the Father of Television? Jock Given sets the record straight. Australia\u27s two major magazine publishers are at war about the “Logies”. It’s a big enough fight for the NSW Supreme Court to have granted an expedited hearing in a case brought by PBL’s Australian Consolidated Press against the Seven Network\u27s Pacific Publications. The court has also restrained both parties from using the name “Logie” and related trademarks until the case is determined. At stake is the ownership of trademarks relating to Australia’s major annual TV awards. These are almost as old as Australian television itself. They got their name when the first “TV Star of the Year”, Graham Kennedy (he shared the award with “Panda”, a GTV9 barrel girl), suggested they be named after the man who “converted the theory of television into reality”. The man Kennedy was thinking of was a Scot, John Logie Baird. But Baird’s claims as the Father of Television are a matter of considerable dispute. He formed a company called Television Limited in June 1925 and developed a mechanical scanning system for “seeing by wireless” which eventually delivered a picture comprising 30 lines of resolution - very low definition even by the standards of a casual human observer in the 1920s. The current analogue TV standard used in Australia comprises 625 lines and high definition systems can deliver over 1000 lines. Baird’s experimental transmissions, especially those over 400 miles of cable from London to Glasgow in 1927, and then from London to New York, attracted a good deal of attention. He hustled both the very young British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Post Office to establish permanent television services. The BBC’s engineering staff, however, were scathing about the technical limitations of Baird’s mechanical system. At 30 lines of resolution, what the viewer saw by wireless simply wasn’t worth watching. Nevertheless, the corporation eventually agreed to allow Baird to undertake test broadcasts using its facilities during non-broadcast hours in 1929. TV sets called ”televisors” were being offered for sale at 25 guineas in 1930 and the BBC began serious development of television that year. Baird’s main problem was that other organisations and individuals were also investing in television research and using different techniques. Some were much better resourced than he was. Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) had responded to the devastation which radio had wreaked on its recorded music business by investing heavily in television research. Around a quarter of its stock was controlled by the dominant US broadcasting company RCA, which was also deeply involved in television research. Baird and his supporters tried to exploit this connection, writing to the Prince of Wales in 1933 suggesting the BBC was “wasting a pioneer British industry” and “giving secret encouragement to alien interests”. Crucially, EMI, RCA and others concentrated their research on electronic scanning systems, using cathode ray tubes, rather than the mechanical scanning techniques with which Baird persevered. EMI demonstrated an electronically-scanned television system to the BBC in late 1932. Comparative tests in April 1933 revealed EMI’s system to be “immeasurably superior” to Baird\u27s. But still the “Father of Television” stuck at his task. When the BBC commenced a regular TV service in November 1936, it was with both systems: a 405-line EMI electronic standard and an upgraded Baird 240-line mechanical system. Three months later, after a further test revealed Baird‘s television system to be still ”distinctly inferior” in key respects, it was announced that transmissions using this technology would cease. This made redundant the Baird system TV sets sold to that point. Baird’s defeat is often cited as a defining example of the modern supremacy of well-funded, co-operative corporate research teams over isolated inventors with ingenious ideas. But in the US, another “lone inventor”, Philo Farnsworth, was granted the first patent for an all-electronic TV system, which was eventually licensed to RCA. Brian Winston suggests bluntly that “Baird seems to have just had a thing about [electrical cathode ray] tubes and an obsession that his first thought was the best Baird failed not because he was alone, but rather because he was simply wrong”. Mechanical scanning produced something, but you couldn’t really call it television. Yet more than half a century later, John Logie Baird’s contribution is secure enough for an Australian court to restrain two media giants from uttering his name. His idiosyncratic engineering may have been no match for global corporate capitalism at the time, but the “Father of Television”’s controversial legacy has squared up more than adequately in the end. Jock Given is a Senior Research Fellow at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research. A version of this article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 13 August 2002