Looking back with Ian Scott on television inventor John Logie Baird and his links to Falkirk

Although most folk know that he invented television exactly a century ago, all Falkirk ‘bairns’ should also know that our town has a strong claim to the man whose ancestors were Camelon farmers and who did much of his pioneering experimental work in our town.

Baird’s great-grandfather was the tenant of Sunnyside Farm and his grandfather farmed at nearby Sunnybrae. Had his father decided to follow the family business then the young John Logie Baird might have been a ‘mariner’ but John senior chose the Ministry and was called to serve in the West Church in Helensburgh. So it was there on August 13, 1888 that he was born. We can be fairly sure that Falkirk, and his family farms, were a regular port of call. No surprise either that he appeared at a much later date working in the town on his most famous project.

Historians who have studied Baird’s life are often exasperated by the gaps and contradictions which they cannot explain. Keeping secrets is the mark of the inventor fearful of the prying eyes of rivals and, in Baird’s case, we have the added suspicion that he was doing work for the Secret Service. We do know that in the early 1920s he came into contact with John Hart the owner of a radio supply shop in Falkirk. Hart was a highly talented electrical engineer with special knowledge of radio transmission so the pair had much in common. It seems that Baird came to Falkirk and worked with Hart in his workshop in the Pleasance and that members of the local Radio Club were familiar with his work. It may have been during this time that the first public demonstration of television took place. I say ‘may’ because this event, if it did take place, is shrouded in mystery and is not acknowledged by the official biographers of Baird. They will tell you that London’s Soho was the real venue in January 1926.

The Falkirk claim is based mainly on an account by the late Robert Shaw, a patternmaker of Larbert. Some years ago I heard Robert tell the story of how as a boy he was sent by his teacher from the Science and Art School in Park Street to see a special demonstration in the Temperance Café in the High Street. That was in December 1925. He says that during the evening Baird invited him to be the subject of a transmission and that his image was sent to a receiver in another part of the building. It seems perfectly plausible but so far no confirmation by way of newspaper reports or other eye witness accounts has been found.

When Hart visited Baird in London in 1926 he was given a piece of apparatus with instructions to place it in a Scottish Museum. Known as the Falkirk ‘televisor’ it is acknowledged as Baird’s work and was probably a prototype of the machine used in London. John Hart moved to premises at the east end of the High Street where the machine was displayed in his window. It may have been used in 1927 in a special transmission between Glasgow and London. It is now a treasured possession of Falkirk Museum but Baird’s name is seldom mentioned. Let’s take the chance to make that right.