Logie Bear

o prophet is accepted in their own country; but some inventors are accepted nowhere else. Inventor of the computer? In Germany, it’s Konrad Zuse. First person to achieve manned flight? If you’re Brazilian, that would be Alberto Santos-Dumont. Inventor of radio? Everyone and the Italians will tell you it’s Marconi; Russians will swear on Alexander Popov’s grave.¹.

For the starkest example of national alternative histories, though, tell an American and a Briton the inventor of television: The British hear of “Farnsworth” and think of Futurama. Americans told of “Logie Baird” hear the name of the ursine Hanna-Barbera anthropomorph.²

But Filo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird aren’t geofenced competitors for a single title. They’re mythic avatars of the same narrative drive, doomed to repeat in time and space the same opening dance: the personable face of an emergent technology, waiting to sidelined and disappointed by the march of time, their own technology’s inevitability and sinister three-lettered transnational corporations.

On January 26th, 1926, on an upper-floor of 22 Frith Street in Soho, London, a group of visitors in evening dress watched as thirty-seven year old John Logie Baird spun up a large rotating wooden disk slotted in front of a light-sensitive cell. Staring at the machine was a ventriloquist’s dummy, “Stooky Bill”³, whose image was squeezed into strips of varying light via a line of thirty holes in the spinning disk, captured by the cell, and serially sent to the “Televisor” in another room. There another spinning disk, synchronised to the first, shone a flickering neon light through a matching set of holes, forming a pale, orange image of Stooky, composed of thirty arches of reconstructed light.

Blurred and dim, the promise was nevertheless already there: the reporter for the Times noting its potential to transmit, instantly, “movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face”.

Anyone who has spent any time in a hackerspace will know Baird: a brilliant demo given to a curious crowd, with loose wiring, dangerous voltages, and hopefully some high-velocity wood-hurling too. They stick around the space, enjoying the tweaking and the demonstration far more than the humiliating hunt for funding and productisation. A few years later, and their idea has either floundered completely, or is simultaneously re-invented, unremuneratively, by thousands of other hopeful parents.

Baird kept on hacking on televisors into the thirties, but ultimately his companies were outpaced by the newly-birthed British conglomerate, Electric and Musical Industries. In 1931 they set up their own Central Research Laboratories, and within a few years had put together prototype equipment for recording stereophonic sound for records and transmitting television efficiently and electronically⁴: enough groundwork to let 1930s EMI tower over British media for rest of the century and to squeeze Baird out of contracts in the British television industry. Or more specifically, the BBC, which was then only game in town.

But even as the chance to mass-market his vision flickered away, Baird’s image persisted. As his demo-sensitivity told him, the public needs to put a face on novelty, even if the master’s voice was coming from somewhere else in the building.

Television was not sourced from a single man with a plan, but popping up simultaneously, as pooled innovations in lighting, photosensitivity and radio transmission came together. But the person who fronts the best demo gets, briefly, parasocially, associated with the magic of the technology, whether its with global Jobsian successes, or filed away on a historical plaque in Frith Street.

Philo Farnsworth occupied much the same same ecological niche in the United States as Baird, moving from his mormon roots in Utah to perfect his “image dissector” in a lab in 202 Green St, San Francisco, just as Philo had come from Scotland to perfect television in Frith Street. Farnsworth demoed and pitched to anyone who would listen, only ultimately to be outrun by the Radio Corporation Of America, whose own immigrant from the Russian Empire, Vladimir Zworykin, led a successfuly search for a marketable cathode ray tube television transmitter and receiver.

Farnsworth and Baird later bonded on their fate, both teenagers dreaming of a technical possibility, emerging from the outskirts to the heart of things, pitching and selling and razzamattazzing, but somehow just establishing the names not the precedents. Their portrayals dimmed over time, only to light up again as the disk turned, and a new generation wanted a better way to understand the start of the tech that now surrounded them.

Farnsworth and Baird traded places: Farnsworth met Baird when he visited the UK to raise funds to sue RCA, and was greeted as a fellow progenitor. And Baird came to New York in 1931 to attempt to escape from the restrictions of the BBC monopoly. To his surprise, he was met at the port by the city mayor, a scots pipe band, and a police escort. Crowds of entrepreneurs flocked to his hotel, trying to cut deals with him, wielding bootleg champagne. Feted at last, but lonely, he begged his partner, concert pianist Margaret Albu, to join him. They eloped and married in a Coney Island hotel, where was hiding out with mistimed flu. When they both returned, his angry backers demanded he pay half of his travel expenses for having adventures on company time.

The United States ultimately proved no better than the BBC: he was shut out of the US market by the fledgling broadcast regulators, who worried about giving broadcasting licenses to a citizen of a foreign power. And when the foreign powers started tearing each other apart in 1939, all television was shut down for the war effort, and Baird went bankrupt.

With no socks to sell, he helped the war effort instead by designing highly sensitive plane surveillance cameras, and locked himself away in his laboratory. His demos of a post-war world, like all post-war dreams, were in high-resolution color. He died in 1946, aged 57.