About this event

This talk covers the 30-line Television era from 1927 to 1935. It includes the results of the recovery of 30-line television video recorded by John Logie Baird from 1927 at the very dawn of practical television. It also covers the development of Baird’s 30-line system through until the end of the BBC’s first Television Service in 1935, illustrated by the surviving 30-line off-air recordings restored in the late 1990s. We can now see that the programme content from those later recordings overturns established views of the 30-line BBC Television Service.  The recovery of images from these discs is a practical example of technological archaeology and this talk, given by the person who restored the images, provides a unique opportunity to hear the story of those fascinating early years when spinning discs and mirrors gave us television.

Speaker Details

Don McLean is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology. He graduated in Physics from Glasgow University and worked in R&D at EMI’s Central Research Labs where he worked in the colour television lab and became an expert in image processing. He became the first person to discover and restore the surviving recordings of 30-line television from the experiments of John Logie Baird in the late 1920s and from the BBC’s first Television Service of 1932-1935. He is the author of the award-winning book ‘Restoring Baird’s Image’ and the producer of the multimedia CD/CD-ROM ‘The Dawn of Television Remembered’