Late great engineers: John Logie Baird- the founding father of television

Stroll along Soho’s Frith Street and before long you’ll find a famous old café called Bar Italia. Look up and to the right of the first-floor window, and you’ll see a blue plaque put there by the London County Council on which are written the words: ‘In 1926 in this house John Logie Baird first demonstrated television’. London’s other blue plaque commemorating Baird – at his residence in Sydenham – simply states that the ‘television pioneer lived here’.

Put these two statements together and you get the nutshell summary of the invention and the innovator who presnted to the world a technology that in turn gave to its people (in the words of Apple’s Steve Jobs) ‘exactly what they want.’ By the year 2026 – a century after Baird demonstrated his fledgling ‘televisor’ to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times – according to Statista, there will be 1.8 billion ‘TV households’ worldwide each with, according to audience insight and data analyst Nielsen, 2.5 televisions per. Rarely has any technology had such influence over our everyday lives. As John Lennon said: ‘If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.’