There can be few people of my age group (i.e. getting on a bit) who would not recognise the name of Baird. However, this seems not to hold good for the younger generation. It is such a shame to find that some of  the young teenagers today knows his name. I expect a  few don't know the name of Marconi either and as for Ambrose Fleming, Heinrich Hertz and other pioneers of radio communication... not a chance.

Still, if you asked a (reasonably knowledgeable) Russian citizen who invented TV you may well get the answer 'Zworykin'. Ask the same question of an American and the answer 'Farnsworth' and so it goes on, almost every country having claim to the creation of television. It does stand as incontrovertible, however, that a British man was the first person in the world to succeed in creating genuine television images. 

Baird put together disparate ideas that had been around for years, at the heart of which was the scanning disc developed by the German inventor Nipkow in 1884. Nipkow was on the right lines - if you'll pardon the pun - but the means were not at hand to develop the device into a useable form. In the early 1920s Baird pressed into use the radio valve which had been invented some years before by Fleming and DeForest. The early valves provided the essential amplification needed to boost the weak signals created by the scanning disc system. Working virtually alone and always pressed financially, he was able by 1925 to demonstrate that he had indeed created television. 

Baird developed his mechanical systems until they reached a quality that would support for test transmissions. The BBC, then holding the monopoly on radio transmissions in the UK were pressured into grudgingly allowing this and Baird transmitted 30-line low definition images on medium wave. He knew that higher definition was essential if TV was to become more than a curiosity. He also understood the need for greater bandwidth that only short wave transmission could provide, but his requests for tests on such frequencies were futile. 

Contrary to popular belief he worked with cathode ray tubes in a number of ways, creating for instance large screen displays of a projection type using small and brilliant tubes. He invented the Telechrome tube, a colour CRT device long predating the RCA shadowmask. The RCA patent describes this as 'prior art'. Among other notable achievements, he invented 'Noctovision', a method of seeing by infra-red light (night vision) and suggested the use of radio waves for a similar purpose, predating radar by some years.