The Inventor of Stereo

Chapter 7

From television to radar

There has to be a winner

Almost at once, following the first few days’ broadcasting, there were some serious problems associated with the Baird Television system. During the initial test period it had been observed that Studio B, the spotlight studio, was hopelessly out of date for the form of programme that was required. The studio had to be operated in near darkness apart from the lights on the subject being televised. These dazzling lights and the practically immobile wet-film camera that was being used became so unwieldy that they were only used on occasional evenings, with the Farnsworth Image Dissector camera being used on most others. The best option for Baird was still the film scanning process, which ...