Man of vision

This is part 8 in my series on the history and impact of distance education. In part 7 yesterday we traced the history of telecommunications and the contribution of the telephone. We continue today with what many of us do just about every evening - taking a look at the television.

Another Scot by the name of John Logie Baird also made a huge impact on telecommunication and indirectly, on modern distance education. Baird is celebrated as a man of great vision - television. In fact, Baird was the inventor of many new technologies, including fiber optics, a technology that looms almost as large as TV in the distance education hall of fame. Born in 1888 in Helensburgh, Scotland, a coastal town about 25 miles to the northwest of Glasgow, Baird was the fourth child of the local church minister. Even as a young boy he was known for his home experiments, one of which literally left him with his fingers burnt! Baird eventually left Helensburgh to seek work in the capital, London, and lived in the South of England for much of the remainder of his life. Much of the early research that defined his lifetime of innovation took place on the south coast in the small towns of Hastings and Folkestone.

Although the original term 'television' (literally 'to see from a distance') was coined by scientist Constantin Perskyi at a conference in Paris in 1900, it was Baird who is credited with the creation of the first operational device that could transmit pictures. Baird successfully tested the prototype of his mechanically scanned disk television in the laboratory in 1925 and it was later demonstrated in public in London in 1926.

However, it was not long before Baird's mechanical version was supplanted by electronic television, which laid the foundation for today's television broadcasts, interactive television and video conferencing technologies. Never the less, Baird's pioneering achievements, including his involvement in the first trans-Atlantic television transmission, were important scientific accomplishments. Baird's far reaching innovation is exactly that - an invention that enables us to reach far across distances to hear and see each other, and to learn together no matter where we are located. The computer and television together provide the basis upon which visual communication and global information access is achieved. There is just one more component needed to achieve global telecommunication though.... which we will discuss in tomorrow's post.

Tomorrow: Part 9: 1945 and all that

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