Talk:John Logie Baird/Draft

The wikipedia's article on Baird has always struck me as very stubby. What little information it has is incomplete or misleading.

As with the article on Sir John Franklin, I'm leaving the WP version around as a scaffold, but as the new materials are added, I will be removing most of it.

My knowledge of Baird is from my viewpoint as a researcher on the history of mass media -- if there are any electrical engineers among the editors, I would welcome some attention to those more technical aspects of Baird's achievements.

Russell Potter 12:21, 31 October 2006 (CST)

I've done a few adjustments on this article, but nothing substantial. My background is in broadcast engineering, so hopefully I can complement what you're doing. Richard Lamont 16:26, 9 January 2007 (CST)

Thanks

Richard, thanks for the note -- delighted to have someone with your expertise interested in this article!

I'd like to see more here -- depth, details, and some accounting of new understandings of Baird made possible by Donald McLean's restored recordings, as as his book and the recent biography by Baird's son Malcolm (written with Anthony Kamm). If done well, this could be a candidate for article approval at some point fairly early on in the project, which I think would be great! Brief explanations of concepts such as 'scanning,' 'bandwidth,' and 'interleaving' would be one thing much needed.

Russell Potter 11:33, 11 January 2007 (CST)

Baird post-1936

Richard, excellent emendations. It's important to have the distinction between electro-mechanical and electronic television early on, I agree. Baird, though, from what I have read in recent studies, was in fact not as troubled by the shift away from mechanical TV as it's been made out, and in fact did some singular work on electronic television on his own after the eventual failure of his former company, eventually coming up with an electronic color picture tube that far exceeded the standards of the broadcast signals of his day, approaching near to what we'd now think of as an HDTV standard (though still analog, not digital). I'd like to find some way to reference this, so that Baird won't just be lumped away as a purely mechanical-TV man ... but I think this could and should come later in the article (I have put a short mention of it there already, I think, but maybe this could be expanded and strengthened).

Russell Potter 11:52, 13 January 2007 (CST)