TRANSFIXED by a whirring assembly of lights and discs, the 40 or so scientists and other invited guests crammed into a Soho garret on 26 January 1926 may have realised the momentous nature of what they were witnessing, even as their images were transmitted to a small screen in the adjoining room. Few, however, could have fully appreciated the profound effect this box of tricks would have on the world.
John Logie Baird was making the first verifiable public demonstration of true television (although recent evidence suggests he had given some largely unrecorded demonstrations in Falkirk the previous year). His invention would transform society unima
ginably, yet it is only now, almost 80 years on, that the drama surrounding the invention of the small screen is at last making it on to the big screen.
A biopic of the Helensburgh-born inventor's life is now scheduled to go into production late next year, with an expected 2010 cinema release, and is likely to star a "household name" Scottish actor as the inventor. The film is being made by Firefly Films, whose Boogie Woogie, shortly due for release, is a lampoon of the contemporary art market, starring Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston and Charlotte Rampling. Written by the Falkirk-born James W Mitchell – who is behind two other forthcoming Firefly productions, The Good War and Beslan – it will be based on the biography John Logie Baird: A Life, co-written by the inventor's son, Malcolm Baird, and Antony Kamm, and will incorporate insights into Baird's work revealed by recent research.
A Baird biopic was almost made 60 years ago, by that one-time hotbed of very British comedy, Ealing Studios, as Malcolm Baird reveals. "There's been talk about a film since 1946," says Baird, a retired professor of chemical engineering living in Hamilton, Ontario. "My father's first biographer was Ronald Tiltman, back in the 30s, and he started talking to Ealing Studios. There was a brief clip in the papers about it in the summer of 1946, then nothing further happened. So we've been talking about this for 60 years."
While initially apprehensive about what liberties a feature film script might take with his father's life, Malcolm is now enthusiastic about the project, particularly as he is a consulting producer, along with Jan Leman, who wrote and directed the 2002 BBC television documentary JLB – the Man Who Saw the Future. "I have a high respect for Jan, who is an old friend, and we have assurances that they're going to stick to what is in the book that Antony Kamm and I wrote," Baird says.
The film should dispel some misconceptions about the inventor, who died in 1946, says his son. "There is a major myth here in North America in which my father is often downgraded because he worked with mechanical television (as opposed to the electronic scanning systems which followed].
"The main misconception is that my father stuck to mechanical television for the whole of his professional life, and that couldn't be further from the truth. He switched in about 1932-33 and started using cathode ray tubes.".
One bitter episode in Baird's life was in 1935, when the BBC rejected his 240-line TV system in favour of the Marconi-EMI 405-line all-electronic system – the last BBC broadcast using the Baird system went out in February 1937. "He was personally very bitter," agrees Malcolm Baird, who adds that his father never enjoyed a happy relationship with the BBC.
He and the corporation's formidable first director general, Lord Reith, seem to have had an antipathetic relationship as far back as their days at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Royal Technical College (now Strathclyde University), when they had an unpleasant early encounter. "But Reith simply didn't like the idea of television, wherever it was coming from," says Malcolm. "He was always much more comfortable with the spoken word."
Quite apart from his invention of television, Baird was also a pioneer of colour and 3D TV and his company also pulled off the first transatlantic TV transmission between London and New York. A driven inventor from his earliest days, he funded his TV work through profits from a patented undersock he had developed, while an early and somewhat less world-shaking invention was a jam-making venture in Trinidad. Somewhat more serious developments included a patented version of what we now call fibre-optics, an early form of video recorder and his Noctovision infra-red night-seeing system.
What the film is likely to bring to public notice is Baird's formerly unrecognised wartime work, some of which is still classified, but which, as recent research has revealed, made a significant contribution to the development of radar. As far back as 1926, Baird was taking out patents for radar-type equipment, while in 1939 his company, Baird Television, fitted out a French bomber with an airborne TV camera for reconnaissance purposes.
To the public, Baird, who could be careless in his dress, was the archetypal absent-minded boffin – although his 400-plus staff at Baird Television knew him as "Personality Joe". Others have described him as concealing "ruthless drive beneath a cloak of benign eccentricity".
To his son, who grew up in Bude, Cornwall, he was "a vaguely benevolent figure. When he came down from London, he'd have one or two things for us to play with. He never lost his temper or tried to push us around too much, most of that was from my mother or grandmother."
While he may have sometimes resembled the classic absent-minded scientist, "driven inventor" is much nearer the mark, says Malcolm. "He wasn't notably forgetful, but was always very preoccupied with what he was doing. When he came down to us in Cornwall on holiday trips, he'd still have diagrams with him and he'd be on the phone to associates in London. The work carried on."
Ask Malcolm, now 73, who he'd like to see play his father and he admits he isn't up to speed with many contemporary films – but he did see the Miss Potter film, about Beatrix Potter, and thought that Ewan MacGregor was very good in it. Jan Leman, a scriptwriter and director who spends his time between Edinburgh and London, isn't being drawn to speculate, but hopes that once the screenplay is completed "it should attract talent of the highest order".
The film's producer, Matthew Hobbs, who worked on Leman's BBC documentary on Baird as well as producing Boogie Woogie for Firefly, reckons it's early days yet, "but given the wealth of Scottish talent, the title role is sure to go to a Scotsman – and no doubt to a household name".
Leman believes that, as a result of the research of the past few years, John Logie Baird is more highly regarded than ever before and the time is right for a biopic: "Until as much of the facts that could possibly be found had been gathered in, there was no point in attempting a feature film. I'm not saying there still aren't some things out there waiting to be discovered, but we now have a good overview of him and can dramatise his life without having to compromise or make things up."
With Baird, reckons Leman, the unadorned truth is fascinating enough. "There's hardly any modern technology you can think of that doesn't have television at its core, whether in car manufacture, newspaper printing, design, medicine … that's part of Baird's remarkable legacy.
"He was a true scientific genius, with 178 patents to his name, all within what was basically a 20-year career. You don't get 178 patents by being a fool. Today entire scientific careers are based on one, two or possibly three patents.
"It is the essence of that 20-year career which will fuel the drama."
JOHN Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh in 1888, a son of the manse who proved insatiably curious and inventive from an early age.
Baird's university studies were interrupted by the First World War and, poor health rendering him unfit for service, he became superintendent engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. After the war, ventures included the patent Baird Undersock, a short-lived jam-making business in the West Indies and Baird's Speedy Cleaner. Moving to the south of England, he devoted himself to working on television and, on 26 January 1926, gave his now famous demonstration in a London attic.
The following year he formed his Baird Television Development Company and in 1928 achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York.
In 1931 he married a South African pianist, Margaret Albu. In 1935 a BBC committee of enquiry rejected his mechanical TV system in favour of the Marconi all-electronic system. In 1938, however, he gave the first demonstration of Baird colour TV.
After apparently making a significant contribution to the wartime development of radar, Baird, dogged all his life by ill health, died in Bexhill, Sussex, in 1946.
The full article contains 1507 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
