The earliest surviving recording of John Logie Baird’s TV transmissions will stay in Scotland, after an anonymous donor stepped in.


It was made on the 20th September 1927 on a 78rpm phonovision shellac disc, recorded and played on what is essentially a television gramophone.

A temporary ban on exporting a collection of early television memorabilia, including the recording, had been due to expire today. The collection was given an asking price of £78,750 earlier this year, and there were fears the historic material would pass into private hands.

However, an anonymous businessman has now stepped in to purchase the lot, to be stored at the University of Glasgow. The donor reportedly lived in Logie Baird’s hometown of Helensburgh for 20 years.

“John Logie Baird was a Helensburgh man and a Scottish pioneer who helped change the world,” the donor explained, “with his ties to the University of Glasgow, it is only right and proper that this important collection should be coming to the university and hopefully it will help inspire future pioneering engineers.”

But what actually features on the recording? Stooky Bill, the world’s first television star! He was a (faintly terrifying) ventriloquist dummy’s head that Logie Baird used for his recognisable (though terrifying) human features. An actual human couldn’t sit in front of the apparatus due to the banks of hot lamps required to generate an image.

Bill’s name is a pun on the Scots word ‘Stooky’, which means a plaster cast you wear on a broken arm. The collection also features the first known use of the acronym ‘TV’ for television, in the log books of Benjamin Clapp, Logie Baird’s assistant.


(Semi-related bonus fact: many of the Oxbridge educated boffins involved in the early days of ‘television’ hated the word. It’s a hybrid, you see: ‘tele’ is from the Greek for “far”, but ‘vision’ is Latin in origin.)