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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Despite the tremendous engineering strides made in the decade after its invention, by 1936 the commercial adoption of television in the United States remained mired in litigation between Farnsworth – who had invented it – and RCA’s David Sarnoff – who wanted to control it.

There were no such impediments in the United Kingdom, where John Logie Baird started using the BBC radio airwaves for experimental television transmissions in 1929.

At the start, Baird’s mechanical ‘Televisor’ was capable of only 30-lines per frame, producing blurry, flickering silhouettes not much larger than a postage stamp.

By the mid 30s, Baird’s system was capable of 240 lines at 25 frames per second, but even that herculean achievement paled in comparison to fully electronic systems on both sides of the Atlantic that were already producing more than 400 lines at 30 frames per second.

Sticking with his antiquated approach cost Baird dearly.

The Race Is On

In 1933 his floundering enterprise was rescued by British Gaumont, the U.K. branch of the French Gaumont Film Company, founded by Léon Gaumont in Paris in the 1890s.  Gaumont’s primary interests were in film production and exhibition, but they were also wary of the impact that television could have on their business. This concern prompted their alliance with Baird who, if nothing else, had become a recognized name in the industry.

The good news for Baird was that for the first time he had sufficient capital to continue developing his mechanical television system. The bad news for Baird was that his new benefactors could see what an anachronism they’d invested in, and, after reducing Baird  to a nominal role in his own company, they went looking for something closer to the state of the art.

And here, not surprisingly, is where the race for television in Britain begins to unfold along the same lines as the race in the United States.

By 1934, RCA had finally developed a video camera tube that served David Sarnoff’s quest to ‘work around’ Farnsworth’s patents – Vladimir Zworykin’s awkward but useful ‘Iconoscope.’  At about the same time,  Britain’s Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) began experimenting with an identical tube it called the ‘Emitron.’  The common lineage of the Iconoscope and the Emitron is too complex to go into here, but suffice it to say they were the exact same tube.

With television on its corporate horizon, EMI formed an alliance in 1934 with British Marconi, the venerable pioneer in wireless communication.  Under the umbrella of a new subsidiary called Marconi-EMI Television Co., Ltd., EMI contributed its research facilities, where Isaac Shoenberg led its television laboratory; Marconi contributed its radio transmission and broadcasting expertise, and – most importantly – its close personal and corporate connections to the BBC.

Well Surprise Surprise!

In addition to close ties to the BBC, EMI was closely affiliated with… wait for it… whole else but… the Radio Corporation of America!

RCA and EMI were very similar companies with very similar pedigrees operating on opposite sides of the Atlantic.^⁠1  Their oddly incestuous  relationship went a step further in 1934, when the two corporate behemoths negotiated a patent cross-license.  That arrangement gave RCA access to EMI’s cutting-edge audio technology.^⁠2 in exchange for EMI gaining access to RCA’s electronic video technology – including the recently introduced Iconoscope.  It wasn’t long before the Iconoscope’s twin, the Emitron, started showing up in experimental British television studios.

The arrangement created dire consequences for John Logie Baird.

All of its alliances and resources gave Marconi-EMI Television access to the state-of-the-art in both content production and broadcasting.

Baird, on the other hand, was still strapped to his spinning wheels and mirrors.

There was only one place British Gaumont could turn to keep the Baird name competitive: to America, and Philo T. Farnsworth, who was invited to sail across the Atlantic to showcase his system in 1934.  Two weeks later Farnsworth and Company sailed back to America with his first bona fide patent license – and a check for $50,000 cash. 

It was not hard to see the limitations of Baird’s mechanical system, but the BBC had to be judicious in its proceedings.  In 1934, the British Post Office — which regulated broadcasting  like the FCC in America — created the Television Advisory Committee, chaired by Lord Selsdon, to evaluate  the competing systems and recommend how the BBC should proceed.

But between Marconi-EMI’s access to RCA’s technology – and their long standing relationship with the BBC – Baird never really stood a chance.

The BBC built two studios at the Alexandra Palace, on a hilltop on the outskirts of London: Studio A for Baird, and Studio B for EMI.  From an antenna atop the “Ally Pally,” the dueling signals broadcast over a radius of 30 miles, effectively covering all of greater London.

Though still technically just the start of the competitive trial, EMI treated its inaugural electronic broadcast from Studio B on November 2, 1936 with the enough pomp and fanfare to infer that it was truly the official start of television service Britain.  Most historians recognize that broadcast as the world’s first regularly scheduled television broadcast service.

On The Air!

In a documentary film of the event – produced by focusing a 35mm film camera at a cathode ray tube display – you can hear the voice of BBC radio veteran Leslie Michael announce “Vision is on… Sound is on. ” Then stage hand blows a whistle, signals a thumbs up and “the station goes on the air.”

On roughly 500 television sets scattered around London – in dealers’ showrooms, laboratories, and the homes of BBC executives and  staff – probably fewer than 1,000 actual viewers saw a white-tied orchestra conductor wave his baton, followed by the satin gowned figure of renowned English actress and singer Adèle Dixon stepping before the camera to sing a song composed specially for the event:

A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays 

Is all about us in the blue…

A filmed-from-the-screen record of the first BBC-TV broadcast

Baird also transmitted something that day, but he was still relying on a 240 line mechanical scanner and could only transmit film, rather than a live studio scene like the EMI broadcast.

Despite his license with Farnsworth, Baird was unable to make effective use of the Image Dissector – even after Farnsworth himself retuned to London in the summer of 1936 to try to get Baird back in the game.

Within three months, the results of the trials were so lopsided that the BBC stopped using the Baird equipment entirely, formally ending the “trial” in February 1937.

The BBC’s adoption of EMI’s electronic television effectively marks the end of the mechanical era of television that began with Paul Nipkow in the 1880s.

In 1937, the BBC settled on the EMI 405-line system, making it the world’s first electronic TV standard to be adopted for regular broadcasting. Over the next two years, programming ran at least two hours every day with adaptations of theater, light musical revues, cooking demonstrations, newsreel,  commentary, and interviews. In 1938, the BBC produced its first original television play, The Maker of Dreams.

And then, like everything else about television, the service was suspended with the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939. 

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In the years that followed, nearly every other industrialized country launched some kind of ‘official’ television service.

In the U.S., RCA attempted a premature launch of television service from the New York World’s Fair in April, 1930, well before any signal standards had been settled or the FCC sanctioned commercial television broadcasting. That event will be addressed in Countdown #94.

Want more on the BBC launch in 1936?  I just found a whole documentary about it on the YouTube, but it will not permit an embed so you’ll just have to click here and go there. 

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1. RCA was, in fact, the RCA/Victor Company, the “Victor” part derived from its acquisition of the Victor Talking Machines Company in 1929.  Both Victor Talking Machines and EMI traced their origins to the inventor of the Gramophone, Emil Berliner, and both used Berliner’s logo and motto: the white terrier “Nipper” cocking his head in front of a gramophone speaker and listening to “his master’s voice.” 
2. Among the EMI patents RCA cross-licensed were Alan Blumlein’s 1931 patents for “binaural sound,” which laid the foundation for modern stereo recording and reproduction, describing not only two-channel audio but also methods for cutting stereo grooves into phonograph records. His concepts predated widespread stereo use by decades, yet proved invaluable once magnetic tape and LP technology caught up after World War II. Tragically, Blumlein was killed in 1942 while testing radar equipment, leaving others to profit from ideas far ahead of their time.

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