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‘Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.’

Television had long been a dream of inventors; serious attempts to build a television system started over 100 years before even the name was invented. Up to the 1920s, television was still called by a variety of names including: Radiovision, Seeing by Wireless, Distant Electric Vision, Phototelegraphy, The Electric Telescope, Visual Listening, Telectroscopy, Hear-Seeing, Telephonoscope, Audiovision, Radio Movies, The Radio Kinema, Radioscope, Lustreer, Farscope, Optiphone, Mirascope.

By the time modern television became a reality, in the mid 1930s, there had already been over 50 serious proposals for television. The competition was truly international, with inventors and companies working in 11 different countries. Many of these pioneers had no success; a few however were able to produce silhouette pictures and were hailed as the ‘inventors’ of television within their own countries.

Thus, the French say both Belin and Barthelemy were the inventors of television; the Japanese believe it was Takayanagi; the Russians say Boris Rosing; the Germans either Nipkow or Karolus; the Hungarians von Mihaly; in the USA most people believe it was either Jenkins or Farnsworth; and in the UK we have the choice of Campbell-Swinton for the concept, or John Logie Baird for television’s practical demonstration.

Although several pioneers had been working on the invention of television as far back as the 1850s, there were four key technologies that had to be developed before any form of television could become a possibility. These were:

• a device to change light into an electric current
• a device to change the electric current back into light
• a scanning device to break the image up into small elements
• an electronic amplifier to increase weak signals to a usable level

Once all of these inventions were in place, they would still need further development before a successful television system could be invented.

The first of the four key inventions happened in 1873 when a telegraph operator discovered that light affected the electrical resistance of selenium. It was soon realised that it was possible to change light into electricity using a selenium photocell.

The next key invention came in 1884 when Paul Nipkow in Germany invented a disc with a single spiral of holes in it as a method of mechanical scanning for television. Although he was never able to build a working system, the Nipkow disc was later used by several TV pioneers as the basis for their own television systems.

 What was needed now was some device to turn an electric current back into light. A conventional light bulb was unsuitable because it could not vary its brightness fast enough to produce a TV image. The Neon lamp was developed by Georges Claude in France in 1902 and was used by many early television pioneers.

 However, the most important breakthrough had happened earlier (in 1897) when Karl Braun in Germany invented the cathode-ray tube. The ‘Braun tube’, although unusable for television at the time, would become the most important television display device for the next century.

The last invention in the chain came in 1906 when Lee De Forest in the USA invented the Amplion (amplifying triode valve), making it possible to amplify the weak video signals created by selenium photocells. A working amplifier took him another six years to develop, and nearly ten years would pass before this amplifier was improved enough for television.

So by 1922 all the key elements were in place for the invention of television, and inventors around the world sensed that success was within reach. Many of them had well equipped laboratories and sufficient funds for staff and equipment. It is therefore surprising that success was snatched by a most unlikely figure.

The story of BBC Television -
TV as we know it

‘There was a picture of a little man with bow legs and a bowler hat, and I said: “What the hell’s that?” And they said: “It’s you Leslie”.’
Television presenter Leslie Mitchell, 1936
The first live programme ever transmitted was Here’s Looking At You, a variety show hastily assembled for RadiOlympia in August 1936. It was performed twice a day for ten days – total programme budget £300 – and featured The Three Admirals (singers from the revue Anything Goes ); Miss Lutie and her Wonder Horse Pogo (fresh from the London Pavilion); tap dancers Carol Chilton and Maceo Thomas; and singer Helen McKay.

Miss Lutie and her Wonder Horse
Pogo perform
The first programme following the official opening on 2 November 1936 was a bulletin of British Movietone News. Other programmes transmitted on that day included variety pieces and the first TV documentary, Television Comes to London. It was shot by Bill Barbrook, the ‘film assistant’, and showed activity behind the scenes in the year running up to the launch – including footage of the mast being erected on the south east tower at Alexandra Palace. It was edited down to 15 minutes, set to an excerpt from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and transmitted through a telecine machine.

But the big live offering of that first night was Picture Page – a visual version of Radio’s In Town Tonight. It was billed as a ‘magazine of topical and general interest’, a talk show with a quirky, faked element of viewer participation. Joan Miller would introduce guests from a telephone switchboard, pretending to receive calls.

‘BBC Television. This is the switchboard of Picture Page . You want to see who? Miss Kay Stammers? Just one moment, Miss Stammers is coming into the studio now. You’re through, you’re looking at Miss Kay Stammers, the celebrated tennis player.’

Thus television’s first catch phrase, ‘You’re through, you’re looking at.’ was born.

Like everyone else working in the new medium, Picture Page interviewer Leslie Mitchell found himself on a steep learning curve. It soon became apparent that scripted interviews did not work. He began by mixing up his questions, to draw more spontaneity from his guests who otherwise tried woodenly to follow what had been rehearsed. But within a few months of the launch scripts were abandoned altogether.

He was also frustrated by a BBC rule that presenters should be anonymous. He was identified only as ‘the male announcer’, until he undermined the system by encouraging interviewees to refer to him by name.

The story of BBC Television -
TV’s crowning moment

‘Put an H-aerial up over your house, and you will be astonished to find how many friends you have in the street’

Manchester Evening Chronicle

In December 1949 a second transmitter station, at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham, was opened. At a stroke it offered the service to a further nine million people. Two years later Holme Moss, high in the Pennines , brought a further 11 million within range. Kirk O’Shotts, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Wenvoe in South Wales had added a further eight million by the summer of 1952, and although there were still many gaps in coverage, BBC Television was at last a national service.

Thus the stage was set for the event that did more than anything else to elevate television from ‘Cinderella’ service to a mainstream medium. The BBC knew, from the experience of the 1937 Coronation, that the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 would be the most demanding television outside broadcast in its brief history, but it had little sense of how important a watershed this would be for television itself.

Planning began immediately after King George VI died (on 6 February 1952), and over the following months the sale of television sets rose in anticipation of the big day. The BBC had acquired 100 redundant military transmitters at the end of the war, and BBC engineers went to work converting them for sound and picture transmissions for the north east of England and Northern Ireland – which would otherwise be without coverage.

The newspapers took great interest in the broadcast arrangements, and speculated on whether or not the cameras, which had been excluded from the King’s funeral at Windsor 15 months earlier, would again be barred from royal ceremony. It was the Queen herself who settled the debate, giving the new medium an unprecedented seal of approval.