On July 3rd 1928 John Logie Baird gave the first demonstration of a colour television transmission.
It's amazing to think the first colour pictures were in 1928, but I remember coming home from school in the early 70's to find our first colour TV in our living room. We couldn't even afford to buy one at that time it was a rental, with a box on the back that we had to put 50p in.
Ronald F. Tiltman, who later wrote a book about Baird, witnessed the first demonstration at the Long Acre laboratory in 1928. He said that
"‘the vivid reality of the colourings seen on the receiving screen was quite remarkable. When the human face was transmitted it showed a delicate pink, while a protruding tongue showed a deeper pink, the subject also tied scarves of various colours round the head and then placed on a policeman’s blue helmet, and each colour came through clearly. A bunch of blue flowers, and another of red roses, appeared in amazingly vivid fashion and as near the original shades as could be determined.’
In August hundreds of people almost fought each other to see Baird’s television demonstrations at Olympia, which included half an hour of songs and droll Irish stories by a star of the day, Peggy O’Neil, and the world’s first television advertisement, for the Daily Mail. In 1929 Baird provided the first-ever BBC television programme, in black-and-white, which led to half-hour programmes five mornings a week, and in 1931 screened the Derby, with much favourable publicity.
The story ended sadly, however, as Baird found himself in competition with the powerful Marconi-EMI organization, whose system the BBC finally preferred. Robbed of the success he had hoped for, the disappointed Baird lived until 1946, when he died aged fifty-seven.
It wasn't until the sixties that this country would get to see the first colour TV broadcasts when in 1967 The BBC starting broadcasting Wimbledon, but we were rationed to just 4 hours a day, rising to 10 hours the next year. The USA had begun 7 years previously. By mid 1968, nearly every BBC2 programme was in colour. Six months later, colour came to BBC1. In 1969, BBC1 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in colour
