John Logie Baird loves inventing things! When he hears about another inventor who has built a machine to show real live pictures, John sets about trying to do the same. Equipped with bits and pieces found in his house, John begins a journey which will change the course of history forever. Mister T.V. follows the life of John Logie Baird and the story behind the invention of the television.

This is a balanced biography of one of the 20th Century's outstanding inventors, published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Baird's first public demonstration of a rudimentary television system.

John Logie Baird is someone whose name is virtually unknown to most Americans. He was a gifted Scotsman who managed to perfect the world's first working television system.

'A fabulous distillation of all the joy and bitterness, hurt and humour of an extraordinary man... I doubt there will be a better written, more interesting or important book published in Scotland this year' - Daily Mail (2004) 'Funds were going down, the situation was becoming desperate and we were down to our last £30 when at last, one Friday in the first week of October 1925, everything functioned properly. The image of the dummy's head formed itself on the screen with what appeared to me almost unbelievable clarity. I had got it! I could scarcely believe my eyes, and felt myself shaking with excitement.' In one of the most extraordinary and entertaining autobiographies to be written by any scientist or inventor, John Logie Baird tells the story of his life and the scientific journey which led to the creation of television. He writes with blunt candour and caustic wit about his childhood in Scotland and the wild escapades of his early business career, when he marketed his own patent brand of medicated undersocks, failed in a hilarious attempt to set up a jam-making factory in the Caribbean and went on to sell soap wholesale. Then he gives the definitive account of the epoch-making experiments through which television was created, and his later troubled relationship with the fledgling BBC and his bête noir, Lord Reith, who disliked television. The BBC obstructed and snubbed Baird at every opportunity. Some of his commercial and scientific rivals made a concerted attempt to discredit his status as the central figure in the invention of television, and even today, this has led to his importance being misunderstood. Edited and introduced by Baird's only son, Malcolm, this new edition will help to set the record straight. This edition features a new preface and updated and expanded footnotes, referencing two important technical books by Dr. Douglas Brown on Baird's work on colour and 3D television during World War II. In August 2020, an American journal published a research article by Brandon Inglis and Prof, Gary Couples, with details of the special photocell that Baird used in early stages of his research (1924-26).

This book builds on a previous work (‘Creative 3-D Display and Interaction Interfaces’) but may be read as a stand-alone book. A trans-disciplinary approach is adopted thereby making the content accessible to wide-ranging audiences from both the sciences and humanities. Additionally, the book is highly relevant to computer users who would like to learn more about new approaches to computer interaction, to those wishing to develop new forms of creative digital media and to those within industry who are involved in the advancement of computers and computer related products.

The migration of immersive media towards telecommunication applications is advancing rapidly. Impressive progress in the field of media compression, media representation, and the larger and ever increasing bandwidth available to the customer, will foster the introduction of these services in the future. One of the key components for the envisioned applications is the development from two-dimensional towards three-dimensional audio-visual communications. With contributions from key experts in the field, 3D Videocommunication: provides a complete overview of existing systems and technologies in 3D video communications and provides guidance on future trends and research; considers all aspects of the 3D videocommunication processing chain including video coding, signal processing and computer graphics; focuses on the current state-of-the-art and highlights the directions in which the technology is likely to move; discusses in detail the relevance of 3D videocommunication for telepresence systems and immersive media; and provides an exhaustive bibliography for further reading. Researchers and students interested in the field of 3D audio-visual communications will find 3D Videocommunication a valuable resource, covering a broad overview of the current state-of-the-art. Practical engineers from industry will also find it a useful tool in envisioning and building innovative applications.

Even though they're dead, the great inventors in this book are still full of surprises! Everybody thinks that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and that John Logie Baird's TV took the world by storm. But in this Horribly Famous title, readers will discover that Edison didn't invent the first light bulb (although he invented a thousand other things) and that Baird's TV was useless.