Enter William Taynton, a 20-year-old office boy who was working downstairs from Baird’s makeshift laboratory. He told the BBC 40 years later to the day: “Mr Baird came rushing down full of excitement and almost dragged me out of my office to go to his small laboratory. I think he was so excited at the time that words didn’t come. He almost grabbed me and wanted me to get upstairs as quickly as possible.”
When Taynton came across the ramshackle state of Baird’s laboratory, he said he felt like running straight back down the stairs. First, he had to navigate his way through wires dangling from the ceiling and strewn all over the floor. “The apparatus he used in those days was a shambles,” said Taynton. “I mean, he had cardboard discs with bicycle lenses and things in it, and lamps of all sorts, and old batteries, and some very old motors he used to make the disc go around.”
Baird sat him down in front of his transmitter: the human subject who could provide the necessary motion that the stalwart Stooky Bill couldn’t. Taynton said that he began to feel the heat and was scared, but Baird assured him he had nothing to worry about. “He disappeared to go down to the receiving end to see if he could see a picture,” Taynton recalled. “I got into focus, but couldn’t stop there much more than a minute because of the terrific heat from these lamps, so I pulled away.” For his troubles, Baird pressed half a crown (two shillings and six pence) into Taynton’s hand – “the first television fee” – and persuaded him to get back into position.
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To capture some movement, Baird asked him to poke out his tongue and make funny faces. Increasingly panicked, Taynton shouted to him that he was “getting roasted alive”. “He shouted back, ‘Hang on a few seconds longer, William, a few seconds if you can.’ So I did, and I really stopped as long as I possibly could until I just couldn’t stop any longer, and I pulled out of focus in the terrific heat; it was very uncomfortable. And with that, Mr Baird came running around from the receiving end with his arms up in the air and he said, ‘I’ve seen you, William, I’ve seen you. I’ve got television at last, the first true television picture.'”
Getty ImagesThe earliest television images of human faces were “very crude”, with “no definition” (Credit: Getty Images)
Taynton had no idea what was meant by “television”, so Baird suggested they swap places. Taynton was glad to get away “because he seemed so excited and a bit mad to me at the time”. He looked down a small tunnel to see “a tiny picture about the size of 2in x 3in (5cm x 8cm)”. He said: “All of a sudden, Baird’s face came on to the screen. You could see his eyes shutting, and his mouth, and movements he made. It wasn’t good, mind you. There was no definition there; you just saw the shadow and the lines all running down. But it was a picture, and it was moving, too, and that was the main thing that Baird achieved. He had achieved a true television picture.”
