John Logie Baird

Born in Scotland on 13 August 1888, Baird trained as an electrical engineer and turned his attention to transmitting moving images by wire and wave. On 26 January 1926, he pulled it off: the first mechanical television system that actually worked. Two years later, in 1928, his Baird Television Development Company sent a television signal across the Atlantic. He followed with the first publicly demonstrated colour television system, then invented the first viable purely electronic colour picture tube - the technology that would eventually replace his own mechanical approach. By the time he died on 14 June 1946, he had done more than anyone to make broadcast television a fact of domestic life. Scotland named him one of its ten greatest scientists; the Royal Mint struck a coin in his memory seventy-five years later.