Mechanical television

John Logie Baird's demonstration in Soho, January 26, 1926 This is the showing usually counted as television's debut, though Baird had shown cruder outline pictures at Selfridges the year before. In his small laboratory at 22 Frith Street, London, members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times watched live moving images on a receiver whose disk had 30 holes in a spiral, spinning in step with the scanning disk at the camera end. The picture was small, dim and flickering. It still proved that live images could be sent and received, and mechanical scanning carried the first wave of experimental broadcasting before electronics overtook it.