The World's First Recordings of Television

The World's First Recordings of Television

Recording television signals in the 1920's? Surely technology was nowhere near ready for recording a video signal back then? Wasn't it Ampex that achieved it in the late 1950's? Not to belittle Ampex Corporation's major achievement, the Scottish inventor, John Logie Baird, did in fact succeed in becoming the first to record television in 1927. This was only a year after being lauded as the first person to demonstrate television. However, no-one said anything about Baird being able to play the pictures back!
So how did a mere inventor with little resources steal this 'first' from major corporate industry - by 30 years? Recording the television signal in the 1920s was much simpler than you might at first think. With only 30 lines per picture (television frame), the highest frequency present was low enough to be audible. The video signal could therefore be recorded as an audio signal onto disc.
Baird did more than create a 'first' on paper. Some of those disc recordings still survive, now 70 years on. Attention has up to now been focused elsewhere as the discs have defied attempts to replay recognisable pictures from them. Baird himself never did publicly demonstrate video playback of the discs, most likely because he failed to overcome the problems.
©Pitman 1931
Now, almost three-quarters of a century on, my custom signal and image processing software allows us to see the images and understand them for the first time. The limitations of the discs makes the recovered imagery fall far short of the original studio quality. We cannot therefore say how good or how bad the 30-line system was, based on the quality or content of these experimental images. Through what is almost an archaeological dig, we can now understand and appreciate not just the pictures but how the recordings were made and what problems Baird encountered in trying to achieve a practical method for video recording.
Most of the restoration work has focused on uncovering the early recordings made by John Logie Baird. These are among the most significant in television's early history and as such have attracted the greatest analysis. The following pages outline the results of that work.