Scottish electrical engineer who pioneered television.

In 1925 he gave the first public demonstration of television and in 1926 pioneered fibre optics, radar (in advance of Robert Watson-Watt), and 'noctovision', a system for seeing at night by using infrared rays.

Born at Helensburgh, Scotland, Baird studied electrical engineering in Glasgow at what is now the University of Strathclyde, at the same time serving several practical apprenticeships.

He was working on television possibly as early as 1912, and he took out his first provisional patent 1923.

He also developed video recording on both wax records and magnetic steel discs (1926-27), colour TV (1925-28), 3-D colour TV (1925-46), and transatlantic TV (1928).

In 1936 his mechanically scanned 240-line system competed with EMI-Marconi's 405-line, but the latter was preferred for the BBC service from 1937, partly because it used electronic scanning and partly because it handled live indoor scenes with smaller, more manoeuvrable cameras.

In 1944 he developed facsimile television, the forerunner of Ceefax, and demonstrated the world's first all-electronic colour and 3-D colour receiver (500 lines).