'Televisor', made by Baird International Television Ltd

'Televisor', made by Baird International Television Ltd, London, 1932.

This Baird Televisor was an early type of television set.

John Logie Baird was one of the pioneers of television. He made his first successful demonstration of television in 1926 and in the years that followed Baird and the BBC began regular experimental television broadcasts using Baird’s system.

Baird’s television system worked mechanically. The picture was generated by a light of varying brightness, shining through a spiral pattern of holes in a spinning metal disc, known as a Nipkow disc. As the light shone through the holes on the spinning Nipkow disc they scanned an image onto the screen one line at time, which happened quickly enough for the human eye to perceive it as a complete moving picture. The screen was on the right side of the Televisor and was very small, with poor quality flickering images made up of only 30 lines, yet remarkable to people at the time.

Although Baird improved his mechanical television system over the next few years, it was superseded by electronic television in the later 1930s which was more convenient for program makers and had much better picture quality.