On 2 October 1925 the Scots inventor John Logie Baird succeeded in sending the first televised image. It was the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stookie Bill, scanned by a whirling disc with 30 holes in a spiral, with the signal sent down a wire to modulate a neon lamp in the receiver; and the moving image appeared on a screen. Four years later he was making test transmissions from London. Prof. Tom Stevenson describes how the system worked – and how two young men in Orkney built their own equipment to receive the pictures.

He tells how the technology developed so rapidly, with the introduction of electronic scanning, that by 1936 the BBC was transmitting a 405-line picture from Alexandra Palace.

Then in 1955 signals from a new BBC transmitter at Meldrum in Aberdeenshire started to reach Orkney in certain weather conditions – and by the end of 1958 Orkney had its own service, from the wartime radar masts at Netherbutton.

In association with Orkney Wireless Museum and the Museum of Communication at Burntisland, Fife.
You can take a virtual tour of the Wireless Museum, and read about it here as well. You can read about the Museum of Communication here too.