1 6 Master Minds of Modern Science 



and no more capable of fulfilment than are many other 

 miracles which man would like to perform, but cannot. 



But an increasing number of dreams equally ' far- 

 fetched ' had materialized during recent decades. Already 

 it was possible to turn night into day by pressing a 

 switch, to talk over vast distances, to operate without 

 pain, to show upon a screen crude, flickering reproduc- 

 tions of animated scenes. But actually to see through 

 walls — it simply could not be done. Nevertheless there 

 were scientists who were wrestling with the idea of wire- 

 less, of speaking and seeing over long distances without 

 an intervening wire, and within a few years of the first 

 conversation on the telephone there was to be born 

 near Glasgow the Scottish boy who was destined, before 

 attaining the age of forty, to solve this problem of tele- 

 vision. John Logie Baird, after whom the Baird Television 

 Development Company, Ltd., is named, would be the first 

 to agree that his twin inventions of television and nocto- 

 vision (seeing in the dark) have not yet reached perfection, 

 but enough has already been done for the story of his 

 achievements to be one of the romances of the age. 



To retell, even briefly, the history of the scientific facts 

 behind television would need the whole of this book. We 

 should have to go back to 1873, when the light-sensitive 

 properties of selenium were discovered, and the first frac- 

 tional part of the riddle — the possibility of turning light 

 into electrical impulses — was solved. 



But selenium proved too slow in action to assist those 

 who sought to make television possible. The author of 

 Television for the Home says : 



It should be realized that television is not really a question 

 of transmitting and receiving a number of images each second, 

 for an image cannot be sent or received as a whole. Each image 

 has to be broken up into thousands of tiny fragments and 

 reassembled by the receiver in a fraction of a second. The 

 practical problem in television was how to transmit nearly 



