I want you to remember the date; Friday, 30 October, 1925. That was the date when 20 year old William Edward Taynton almost became the second most famous face of the twentieth century. because John Logie Baird, was a genius. But Baird was, unfortunately, a genius who was wrong - a rather common phenomenon. But why William would never be famous is best understood if you take a moment and try, like Baird, to invent television from scratch.
The idea behind television had actually been patented by German engineering student Paul Nipkow back in 1885. But it doesn’t appear Nipkow ever actually built a working device because it was darn near impossible to do so. At the core of Nipkow’s patent was a disc with a hole in it (or holes) which allowed light from the subject focused by a lens to fall on a piece of Selenium, which is one of those paradoxical toxic killer chemicals without which human life is not possible - sort-a-like salt.
Selenium had been identified as photoelectric as far back as 1839, meaning that when photons hit it, the chemical emitted electrons – it converted light into electricity. But until Nipkow, nobody could figure out a use for it. And it was poisonous to even handle. Now, when Nipkow’s disc was set to spinning at high speed it built up a flickering signals from the Selenium which could “paint” in binary (on/off bursts of electrons) a recreation of the subject reflecting light into the lens.
In fact the process is far more complicated then it sounds because you needed two spinning discs, each with multiple holes and you have to match their rotations, and because the signal produced was in direct proportion to the quantity of photons striking the Selenium, and because only a fraction of the light was reflected off the subject toward the Selenium, the subject had to be so bright it almost melted. And Nipkow could only produce one image a minute.
And then there was the problem of scale. The image created was no larger than the Selenium, which meant the image could be no larger than the size of a business card. And all those problems were repeated in reverse at the receiving end.
It was enough to make you pull your hair out, which may explain why Paul Nipkow (above) developed such a prominent receding hairline.
Enter the sickly, oddly obsessed genius, John Logie Baird. At twelve Baird had been labeled “very slow” and “…by no means a quick learner.” But as an adult he was the prototype for the idiosyncratic absent minded professor - “...disheveled, shaggy-haired and sallow “ He was the prototype for a British amateur scientist - except that he was Scottish.
Baird did not have large corporations supporting him. Instead, working in a tiny workshop among the tourist traps in Hastings, England, Baird had actually improved on Nipkow’s device, transmitting his crude images across an entire room. Okay, it wasn't a large room, but it was a transmission.
But in July of 1924 he almost electrocuted himself, and darn near burned down his rooming house. Whereupon his landlord politely asked him to leave.
So Baird moved to an attic room in Bah Iitalia Hotel in the Soho section of London with his equipment and his ventriloquist's dummy head he called Stooky Bill.
His Nipkow disc and transmitter were “...glued together with sealing wax and string…but it worked.” Desperate for investors, and a regular income, Bard dropped by unannounced to the Daily Express tabloid newspaper, offering a demonstration. The editor pleaded with his staff, “For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”
That editor missed a great story. Baird could now scan twelve images a second, which made live transmission of motion, practical. Sort of. And that was why he went to see William Edward Taynton.
William was an office boy who worked a few floors below Baird’s room. He was also partially disabled. He had expressed an interest in Baird’s experiments and the two had struck up an unlikely friendship. Perhaps it was that Baird could find no fellow scientists who understood or believed in his methods. But it was on this penultimate day in October that Baird asked William to come up stairs and help him with an experiment.
William sat in a straight back chair in front of Baird’s Nipkow scanner. He had to shut his eyes very tightly to avoid being blinded (even with his eyes closed) by the banks of bright lights.
The photoelectric cell had no signal booster so the light reflected off of William’s face would produce an image of only equal power. The lights were so hot that William had to be paid to stay put. Baird turned the scanner on, the discs began to spin and Baird asked William to slowly turn his head to the left and then to the right. It might have been an historical moment. Instead the blasting glare produced only a shadow of fame.
In 1954 William Taynton (above) appeared on the American television game show “I’ve Got a Secret”. In 1965 he spoke with a BBC show about his friendship with John Baird. But William himself was never properly famous. The first human whose image was captured on television was not even recognizable, in part because the image was so primitive, and in part because John Baird was on the wrong track.
Baird’s invention was mechanical. The invention by the American, Philo Farnsworth, would be electronic. The Mormon genius had invented his method while he was still a teenager in high school. His scanner was not a spinning disc but a sweeping arc of electrons; faster, more precise and overall simpler than the Nipkow disc. With no mechanical moving parts, the Farnsworth invention was true television.
Still, John Baird kept plugging ahead. In January 1926 he demonstrated his system before fifty scientists. They were amazed. Investors finally responded, including the BBC.
In 1927 Baird sent a moving live image (in color) over 438 miles via telephone lines, between Glasgow and London. The first long distance television broadcast and the first color broadcast. In 1927!
Then in 1938 the BBC compared Baird’s system to Farnsworth’s system. During the competition Baird received a demonstration from Farnsworth himself, and even before the BBC's decision was announced Baird merged his private British company with America's RCA Corporation to gain access to Farnsworth's patents. But Baird was caught in a doomed competition without enough funds. His mechanical version of television died a merciful death.
In 1946 the sickly Baird died of a heart attack. It would be sixty years before his contributions to television would be remembered, including his invention of the very word, “television”. He deserves to be remembered for that, if nothing else.
And it happened the way it did because, in 1840, a mob of French "Luddiet" tailors smashed Thimonnier’s machines, burned the factory down and almost lynched Barthelmy. With his investment left smoldering, Barthelmy died flat broke and forgotten in 1857. But first he had invented the sewing machine. The vacuum he left behind was filled by the American Walter Hunt, who was a mechanical genius and a business boob from upstate New York. Among other things, Walter invented the safety pin, U.S, patient #6281, and a repeating rifle, and a bicycle and a road sweeper. And then, in 1834, he improved on Thimonnier’s sewing machine.
What Walter Hunt actually invented was a sewing needle with the hole - aka, the eye - at the pointy end. As the needle pushed through the cloth the eye carried the thread with it. When the needle stopped it formed a loop in the thread behind it, and a second thread (from the bobbin) was pushed through the loop. The needle was then withdrawn, pulling the loop tight or “locking” it, around the bobbin thread. This “Lockstitch” was sheer genius and a brilliant insight. But Hunt never did anything with it because he didn’t want to be lynched by American tailors and he was safely making plenty of money from his safety pin. And that opened the door for Elias Howe.
Elias Howe told at least two versions of how he "invented" the sewing machine. In the sympathetic version he spent hours watching his poor wife (since dead, and unavailable to testify) support her family doing piecemeal sewing work . In the Freudian version, Howe dreamed about Indians shooting arrows through a blanket. In fact, both stories were pure horse manure.
Then in 1850 Howe saw a demonstration of a machine which did work, built by a mechanic and an actor and one of the most foul-tempered bigamists in antebellum America, Mr. Isaac Singer. Singer’s sewing machine put the needle vertical and fed the cloth in horizontally, which made the whole thing functional. But Howe noticed that Singer had 'borrowed' his lockstitch, which you may remember Hunt had actually invented but never patented. Anyway, Howe immediately demanded $25,000 in “royalties” (i.e. blackmail). One of Singer’s long suffering business partners observed that, “Howe is a perfect humbug. He knows quite well he never invented anything of value.” Singer was typically more direct, offering to “kick (Howe) down the steps of the machine shop.” What eventually made Howe a wealthy humbug was his patent for Mr. Hunt's lockstitch. As a magazine at the time noted, Howe had “litigated himself into fortune and fame.” But then this story is not about the sewing machine.
This story is about another patent Elias Howe trolled for, this one granted him in 1851. And just like his sewing machine, Howe’s patent for an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” did not work. And just like his sewing machine, rather than improve it, he just filed it away and waited to see if anybody else ever fixed it. But, since nobody else made his ugly and clumsy device work during his lifetime, Howe had nobody to sue and the device remained an obscure little footnote. And people continued to live with the original “Clothing Closure” device, the button.
Originally Whitcomb Judson was not interested in replacing the button. This rather odd man liked to eat bananas and mushrooms because he thought the mushrooms gave him psychic powers. Judson’s “mushroom visions” told him was going to get rich designing pneumatic street cars. He was granted 14 patents for them, They were a mode of transport powered by, as described rather unhelpfully in his advertising “…a screw, but without a thread; and this screw though always revolving in one direction, will send the (trolley) cars in either direction, and do this by a pure and simple rolling and not a sliding friction..” It sounded mysterious and magical and overly complicated, and was actually used briefly in England in 1864 to transport tourists 600 yards between Waterloo and Whitehall underground stations. But Judson’s railway went no father in England went nowhere at all in America. So, in 1893, as a back up invention, he marketed his patent #’s 504038 and 504037 as a “claps lock” for ladies high button shoes, and “…wherever it is desired to detachable-ly connect a pair of adjacent flexible parts.” Judson was clearly no writer.
Mr. Judson explained that “...each link of each chain (4 links per inch) is provided both with a male and a female coupling part…”. But sadly this coupling had a tendency to pop open, leaving the lady in question barefoot on the public way. So, in 1896, Judson added “….a cam-action slider…” to his invention, now calling it his “C-curity Fastener”. The company he formed to exploit the C-curity (The Universal Fastener Company) did well, and the gilled fungi lover was making money, but he never got as rich as he had expected. It was a shame the mushrooms never warned Judson about the dangers of eating too many mushrooms because Judson died of liver failure in 1909.
And that brings us to the dull Mr. Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback, a Swiss emigrant to Canada, working as an electrical engineer for the Universal Fastener Company, and married to the plant manager’s daughter, Elvira. In 1911 Elvira died, and to distract himself from his grief Gideon started fiddling with Judson's “C-curity Fastener”. He added more teeth (the male coupler), ten to an inch, and widened the slider, and then he realized he could do away with the couplers entirely. All he needed was the teeth and the slider. Gideon called his invention the “'Separable Fastener”. It was granted Patent # 1219881, in 1917. Gideon even designed a machine to mass produce his fastener. But it remained a curious thing, attracting very little attention except on ladies hi-button shoes... Until!
In 1923, Mr. B.F. Goodrich saw the new fasteners used on a pair of rubber galoshes his company was trying to sell the U.S. Army. B.F. was delighted, and in demonstrating the new rubber boots he told an employee to “Zip ‘er up.” And thus was born the onomatopoeia of the new invention, the name that sounds like the sound the Separable Fastener makes when it is used; the zipper. And the world has been a better place ever since.
