In 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird became the first person to transmit live moving pictures to a remote receiver. This radical new technology was to give birth to the television of modern culture.

Working out of a makeshift lab, the unknown and underfunded Baird built a camera that scanned objects with a strong beam of light. A photoelectric cell was used to convert the light and shadows into electricity, and a receiver converted it back to light and shadows. On October 2, he managed to scan a doll's head and watch it on a screen in the next room. He ran to the building across the street, and hired an office boy to sit in front of the camera. Young William Taynton became the first person to be televised.

Baird's system was a crude combination of spinning disks that had holes, to produce beams of light as well as to convert the lines into projectable images. Although it functioned, the flickering pictures made viewers dizzy.

While Baird continued experimenting with his mechanical toy, others looked into electronic systems. In 1908, British physicist A.A. Campbell Swinton had written about a possible electronic television. Russian-born American physicist Vladimir Kosma Zworykin and Utah student Philo T. Fansworth both developed early picture tubes. In 1927, Fansworth unveiled a system that worked without the clunky Nipkow disks that Baird had relied on. Electric (tele)vision had arrived.