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Originally Posted by David Roper
he rose to the level of his own incompetence by refusing to envision a TV system that didn't somehow incorporate a motor.
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Pardon? Are we talking about John Logie Baird, acknowledged Father of television or James Leslie Baird; renowned Fishmonger and sometime wireless experimenter of Billingsgate, London? If the former, I must take issue with you young Sir. Mr. Baird, forever ignored by the BBC because he fell out with them big style in the early years did perhaps persevere with his mechanical scanning system for a bit too long, but it has to be remembered that his workshop/studio at Alexander Palace mysteriously caught fire in the middle of the pre war BBC trials of both systems, effectively handing the award to EMI without fair contest. Mechanical scaning has its problems; but Baird managed to get the system up to 200+ scaning lines on a budget that would not have kept EMI in light bulbs. What people forget about the Baird system is that it was first envisioned as a `vision only' add on to existing radio technology; some pre war U.K. radio sets even have `television' marked on the tuning dial; they carried television sound plus sync pulses for the scanning disc.
Just imagine what things would have been like if he'd had a decent R & D budget. Would he have seen the limitations of mechanical scanning and given up on it, or researched ways to overcome these limitations in order to reap the benifits of narrow bandwidth and extreme long range that the system had to offer? Hmmmmmmmmmm? Jim