Video special: The place in Sussex where the first television images were broadcast

Television was invented in Hastings, East Sussex, just over 100 years ago by John Logie Baird. He made the world’s first television images in a room above a shop in the Queens Arcade, opposite the town hall.

Baird, born in Glasgow in 1888, had come to Hastings because of poor health and decided that while recuperating he would explore various ideas he had had for some time. One of these was ‘the moving transmission of pictures by wireless’ - television as we know it today.

In his autobiography Baird recalled: “I went for a walk over the cliffs to Fairlight Glen, and my mind went back to my early work on television. Might there not be something in it now?”

After many experiments, Baird managed to transmit images of a moving hand. This was the first time anyone had achieved an instantaneous moving picture anywhere in the world.

Baird spent all of 1923 making his historic invention workable. He took out a patent, and in the summer of 1924 he moved to Frith Street in London’s Soho. Here on 26 January 1926 he gave his first big public demonstration of his ‘televisor’ system, as he called it. The image was poor, but it attracted enough interest to make Baird the leading figure in the growth of television.

In 1944 he moved to Bexhill, where he died of a stroke on 14 June 1946.

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