One Summer: America, 1927

as a crime prevention device. ‘A criminal suspect might appear simultaneously in a thousand police headquarters for identification,’ it supposed. AT&T saw it not as an entertainment medium, but as a way of allowing people on telephones to see each other.
    Only Charles Francis Jenkins saw clearly what TV could offer. ‘The new machine will come to the fireside … with photoplays, the opera and a direct vision of world activities,’ he predicted. Though forgotten now – he doesn’t even have an entry in the American Dictionary of National Biography – Jenkins was an accomplished inventor. He owned over four hundred patents, several of them for successful devices, some of which we use yet. If you have ever had a drink from a conical paper cup, you have used a Jenkins product. But one invention that was never going to work was his radiovisor,as he called it. Even if he got it working, which he did not, it could only ever transmit forty-eight lines of image, not enough to show objects as anything other than shadowy blurs. It would be like trying to identify objects through frosted glass.
    But this was the deliriously upbeat 1920s, and although Jenkins did not have a product to sell, or anything more than a vague (and ultimately unrealizable) hope that his system could be developed into something commercially appealing one day, he formed a corporation, which was soon valued at more than $10 million.
    Much the same sort of inflated optimism attended the efforts of John Logie Baird, a Scotsman based in London. From an attic flat in Soho, Baird created a stream of mostly useless inventions, including inflatable shoes and a safety razor made of glass (so it wouldn’t rust). His private life was equally unorthodox in that he and another man shared the affections of a woman who had once been Baird’s girlfriend, was now the second man’s wife, and who found it impossible to choose between the two. In true British fashion, the arrangement to share was agreed between all three over a cup of tea.
    As an inventor Baird was inspired and indefatigable, but always painfully short of funds. Most of his working models were assembled from salvaged oddments and other scraps. His first Nipkow disc was the lid of a ladies’ hatbox. His lenses were made from bicycle headlights. Wondering if he might get a better resolution of his images if he shone them through a real human eye, he called at the Charing Cross Ophthalmic Hospital and asked if they had any eyes they could spare. A doctor, thinking him a qualified anatomist, gave him one. Baird took the eye home on the bus, but discovered that the optic nerve was useless without a blood supply, and anyway when he clamped the eyeball into his contraption he made such a gruesome mess of it that it made him ill and he put it all in the bin.
    Still he persevered and in 1925, in his lab, Baird managed totransmit the world’s first recognizable image of a human face. Baird was an accomplished publicist – one of his stunts was to place a working TV in a window of Selfridges department store, drawing crowds great enough to stop traffic – and that brought a rush of financing. By 1927, Baird was at the head of a company that had nearly two hundred employees. He was not a good company man and hated having to answer to a board of directors. Developing a particular dislike for Sir Edward Manville, the pompous chairman imposed on him by his principal investors, Baird had a lab built with an intentionally narrow entrance. The portly Manville, on his first visit, got stuck and had to be pushed through from behind. As Baird recalled proudly, ‘he lost several buttons from his waistcoat and dropped his cigar and tramped on it in the process’ and never visited the lab again.
    The inescapable shortcoming of a Nipkow system, as Baird found to his unending frustration, was that it required a pair of large, noisily whirring discs – one to send and one to receive a signal – and could produce at best only a small image. A four-inch-square picture would require spinning discs six feet across – not something that many people would want in their living rooms. The discs could be dangerous, too, as a visiting scientist to Baird’s lab painfully discovered when he leaned too close and his long white beard was yanked into the workings.
    The reality that Baird and all the others involved with mechanical television could never overcome was that spinning discs simply could not provide the clarity of