Talk:John Logie Baird/Draft

Article Checklist for "John Logie Baird/Draft"

Workgroup category or categories	Media Workgroup, Engineering Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Stub: no more than a few sentences
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Russell Potter

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The wikipedia's article on Baird has always struck me as very stubby. What little information it has is incomplete or misleading.

As with the article on Sir John Franklin, I'm leaving the WP version around as a scaffold, but as the new materials are added, I will be removing most of it.

My knowledge of Baird is from my viewpoint as a researcher on the history of mass media -- if there are any electrical engineers among the editors, I would welcome some attention to those more technical aspects of Baird's achievements.

Russell Potter 12:21, 31 October 2006 (CST)

I've done a few adjustments on this article, but nothing substantial. My background is in broadcast engineering, so hopefully I can complement what you're doing. Richard Lamont 16:26, 9 January 2007 (CST)

Thanks

Richard, thanks for the note -- delighted to have someone with your expertise interested in this article!

I'd like to see more here -- depth, details, and some accounting of new understandings of Baird made possible by Donald McLean's restored recordings, as as his book and the recent biography by Baird's son Malcolm (written with Anthony Kamm). If done well, this could be a candidate for article approval at some point fairly early on in the project, which I think would be great! Brief explanations of concepts such as 'scanning,' 'bandwidth,' and 'interleaving' would be one thing much needed.

Russell Potter 11:33, 11 January 2007 (CST)

Baird post-1936

Richard, excellent emendations. It's important to have the distinction between electro-mechanical and electronic television early on, I agree. Baird, though, from what I have read in recent studies, was in fact not as troubled by the shift away from mechanical TV as it's been made out, and in fact did some singular work on electronic television on his own after the eventual failure of his former company, eventually coming up with an electronic color picture tube that far exceeded the standards of the broadcast signals of his day, approaching near to what we'd now think of as an HDTV standard (though still analog, not digital). I'd like to find some way to reference this, so that Baird won't just be lumped away as a purely mechanical-TV man ... but I think this could and should come later in the article (I have put a short mention of it there already, I think, but maybe this could be expanded and strengthened).

Russell Potter 11:52, 13 January 2007 (CST)

I think Baird's Telechrome tube represents an interesting step on the way to the development of the shadowmask tube, but I doubt it could ever have been a practical display device on its own. I agree this and any other of his later inventions belong later in the article.

It may also be worth exploring the extent of his influence on the Hankey committee. Baird was lobbying for 1000 lines. It's interesting that the GPO London-Birmingham coaxial cable built after the war included two 1-inch diameter 'tubes' capable of handling 1000-line TV. I've also seen references to the possibility of 1000-line TV in late 1940s papers relating to the GPO microwave network in the National Archives. This is primary source stuff; I don't know whether any of the biographers to date have used it. Richard Lamont 05:53, 14 January 2007 (CST)

Agreed, on the Telechrome tube -- nevertheless, I feel strongly that some allusion to this work should be made in th e opening paragraph (with main discussion later) to help dispel the clearly erroneous notion that Baird either scorned or failed to understand electronic television. Russell Potter

Article substantially reworked from WP

Just a note to emphasize -- this article has been substantially reworked and improved from the WP version. The section on Baird's later (post-1936) work is almost entirely new; the illustration is new (and better, I think), and numerous corrections have been made throughout. More, of course, needs to be done! I would like to see a more evolved description of Baird's technical innovations, as well as more detail on his life. Russell Potter