The huge shop was elegant, glamorous and pioneering – offering shopping as a social and leisure pursuit, rather than a necessity. The flamboyant American retail impresario, Harry Gordon Selfridge, founded Selfridges department store in London’s Oxford Street in 1909. Demonstrations at Selfridges Harry Gordon Selfridge photographed around 1910. Image in the public domain. He realised he needed publicity to attract investors and help further his mechanical television ambitions. Listed Grade II © Nicky Hughes.īaird moved to London in 1924, renting an attic in Soho, turning it into his laboratory and experimenting obsessively with his complex device – a big rattling, dangerously vibrating machine, subject to constant breakdowns and parts flying off. Laboratory in London’s Soho 22 Frith Street, Soho, London (home to the famous Bar Italia since 1949) where John Logie Baird invented television. Using apparatus improvised from everyday household items, including a tea chest-mounted with an engine, along with a perforated spinning cardboard disc made from a hat box with darning needle spindle and attached bicycle lenses, he finally succeeded in producing a simple outline image of an object. All came to nothing.īut Baird’s dream, along with other early innovators, was to create a way of transmitting and receiving moving images. Here the budding entrepreneur aspired to make money, inventing a glass razor blade that would never rust and pneumatic shoes with inflated balloons to aid walking. His commemorative plaque is visible to the right of the front door © Oast House Archive.ĭogged by ill health since childhood and unfit to serve in the First World War (1914-1918), Baird eventually rented a property in Hastings in 1923, hoping the sea air would boost his constitution. Baird moved to 21 Linton Crescent on a steep hill in Hastings, East Sussex.
John Logie Baird was clever, with a curious mind.Īs a young child, he was fascinated by technology and was a fledgeling inventor, even installing electric lighting in his parents’ Scottish home when he was a teenager. Early life and experiments John Logie Baird (1888-1946), inventor of television. The moment happened when the Scottish engineer, John Logie Baird, a driven maverick inventor, succeeded in producing an image of the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy that he called Stooky Bill. Television was born in a rented attic in London’s Soho on 2 October 1925.
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