I was a Scottish engineer, most famous for being the first person to demonstrate a working television.

I was born on 14 August 1888 in Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland, im son of a clergyman. Dogged by ill health for most of my life, he nonetheless showed early signs of ingenuity, rigging up a telephone exchange to connect my bedroom to those of my friends across the street. My studies at Glasgow University were interrupted by the outbreak of World War One. Rejected as unfit for the forces, I served as superintendent engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. When the war ended i set himself up in business, with mixed results.

then i moved to the south coast of England and applied mymself to creating a television, a dream of many scientists for decades. My first crude apparatus was made of odds and ends, but by 1924 i managed to transmit a flickering image across a few feet. On 26 January 1926 i gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in an attic room in central London. In 1927, my television was demonstrated over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow, and i formed the Baird Television Development Company. (BTDC). In 1928, the BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. I also gave the first demonstration of both colour and stereoscopic television.

In 1929, the German post office gave me the facilities to develop an experimental television service based on my mechanical system, the only one operable at the time. Sound and vision were initially sent alternately, and only began to be transmitted simultaneously from 1930. However,my mechanical system was rapidly becoming obsolete as electronic systems were developed, chiefly by Marconi in America. Although i had invested in the mechanical system in order to achieve early results, i also been exploring electronic systems from an early stage. Nevertheless, a BBC committee of inquiry in 1935 prompted a side-by-side trial between Marconi's all-electronic television system, which worked on 405 lines to my 240. Marconi won, and in 1937 my system was dropped.

Im died on 14 June 1946 in Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex.