OTD in early British television: 28 July 1939
John Wyver writes: ‘Television in full colour: demonstration by Mr J.L. Baird’ was the headline to the report on Friday 28 July 1939 by the Daily Telegraph‘s radio correspondent L. Marsland Gander. His lede ran:
Important progress in recent experiments in the television of images in full colour was revealed yesterday in a laboratory at the Sydenham home of Mr J.L. Baird, who, in 1925, was the first person to transmit and receive television images.
Context for where this demonstration fits into the story of colour television in Britain can be found here, from the National Science and Media Museum, which is also where you can find the image above from 1940 of Baird demonstrating a television system in his home.
Marsland Gander’s report continued:
Still and moving pictures were transmitted from a tower of the Crystal Palace, two miles away. They were projected in the laboratory on a white paper screen 3ft square.
Sitting about 12 ft from the screen, I first saw a coloured photograph of the King, then a Union Jack and a still picture of Popeye. Afterwards an engineer at the Crystal Palace came before the transmitter wearing gaily-coloured carnival hats.
Flesh tints came through well. Blue and red reproduced brightest, but scarlet tended to have an orange tint.
Definition was not as good as in BBC black and white television from Alexandra Palace. Transmission was, however, made only at the rate of 100 lines per picture, compared with the 405 lines used by the BBC. The new Baird picture is streaked with a number of vertical black lines; occasionally it quivers slightly.
The important point is that for the first time a receiver, picking up coloured images, has incorporated a cathode ray tube. Thus it was possible to dispense with heavy and complicated mechancial apparatus which was used when Mr Baird gave a demonstration at the Dominion Theatre last year…
I asked Mr Baird what development was likely to succeed the perfection of colour television.
‘To make the images walk about in the room,’ he replied. This was not a jest; he has alrady made preliminary experiments with stereoscopic television.
Eighty-five years on we are still waiting for moving holographic figures at home.
Image: John Logie Baird (fourth from left) giving a demonstration of his television system at his home in London, 20 December 1940; © Science & Society Picture Library (SSPL)
[OTD post no. 223; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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