CHAPTER I 



THE WONDER OF WIRELESS SIGHT 

 John L. Baird, Pioneer of Television 



WHEN the telephone was invented by Graham 

 Bell more than fifty years ago, and the world 

 was thrilled by the possibility of hearing voices 

 over great distances, some one remarked that " We shall 

 be seeing at a distance next." 



Many thought that the prophecy was a joke, but the 

 brains of scientists have a habit of ' worrying ' at problems 

 tirelessly, and even one as difficult as this is at length 

 solved. Though baffled again and again, keen minds 

 maintained the endeavour to fulfil that prophecy, until 

 one day in October 1925 a young Scottish inventor, poor 

 and unknown, was working alone in a London attic 

 when suddenly he saw on the screen of his home-made 

 apparatus the image of a dummy head that was in the 

 next room. The prophecy had become a scientific fact 

 — that inventor, the first man in the world to see through 

 a brick wall, as it were, had made television possible, and 

 ensured for himself an enduring place in the history of 

 scientific research. 



But that is anticipating our story. To appreciate that 

 achievement in a Soho attic one must know something 

 of the long search for the secret of television and of 

 John Logie Baird, the remarkable and patient scientist 

 who has given humanity ' long-distance eyes ' — the 

 ability to see persons and objects thousands of miles away. 



Television, or its equivalent, had been a dream of 

 centuries. Most people regarded it as just a dream, like 

 the search for the food of the gods, or the elixir of life, 



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