22 Frith St, London, W1D 4RP, UK

January 1926

John Logie Baird

In his laboratory on 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy nicknamed “Stooky Bill” in a 32-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second. Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.

On 26 January 1926, Baird gave the first public demonstration of true television images for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. Baird initially used a scan rate of 5 pictures per second, improving this to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation.