His studies at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. Declared unfit for service, he served as a superintendent engineer for the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. When the war ended, he started various businesses, with mixed results.
Baird He then moved to the south coast of England and set about creating a television, a dream of many scientists for decades. He made his first apparatus with lags, but in 1924 he managed to transmit a flickering image across a few meters. On January 26, 1926, he gave the first real television demonstration before 50 scientists in an attic in central London. In 1927, his television was demonstrated over 438 miles, via the telephone line between London and Glasgow, and he 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 the middle of the Atlantic. He also gave the first color and stereoscopic television demonstration.
In 1929, the German post office gave him the facilities to develop an experimental television service based on his mechanical system, the only one that could work at that time. Image and sound were initially sent alternately and only began to be broadcast simultaneously from 1930. However, Baird’s mechanical system was rapidly becoming obsolete when electronic systems were developed, mainly by Marconi-EMI in the UK and USA.
Baird died June 14, 1946 at Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex.