Yahoo News 
On This Day: British inventor John Logie Baird tests world’s first TV set
A British Pathé newsreel showed Baird’s machine using mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses
October 2: British inventor John Logie Baird successfully tested the world’s first television on this day in 1925.
He first transmitted a moving picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy before filming his 20-year-old assistant William Taynton at their workshop in London.
A British Pathé newsreel showed Baird’s machine, which he called a “televisor”, using mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses.
On This Day: Britain tests its first atom bomb
It also showed the then 37-year-old Scotsman demonstrating the revolutionary device, which was also popularly known as a “seeing wireless”.
His machine produced just 30 lines of resolution compared to the thousand-plus that modern TVs are capable of.
And - despite breaking new ground, including the first transatlantic broadcast – other inventors would quickly surpass Baird’s design.
The Briton’s most notable rival was Philo T Farnsworth, the son of a poor Mormon farmer from Idaho, who demonstrated the first all-electronic TV in 1934.
However, Farnsworth was also unable to dominate the market because other firms were quickly able to develop the same cathode ray tube technology.
In November 1936, the BBC began transmitting the first public TV service and alternated daily between Baird’s disk and Marconi EMI’s CRT systems.
By February, however, the Corporation had dropped Baird’s 240-line technology in favour of the better quality 405-line alternative.
Since then, televisions have continued to evolve, from colour sets becoming widely available from the 1960s to modern high-definition digital TVs with plasma screens.
And, although Baird’s technology was beaten, he helped change the world we live in.
Today there are 65million TVs in Britain – enough for every man, woman and child in the country.
Baird, who was ranked 44th in the BBC’s 2002 list of the 100 Greatest Britons, also invented infra-red night viewing and developed fibre-optics.
But the son of a clergyman was dogged by ill health for most of his life and ended up selling the right to his name to EMI.
He died from a stroke aged 57 in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex in 1946.
