†In an article written in 1908, a Scottish electrical engineer named Alan Campbell Swinton described a completely electronic television system. He proposed that the cathode ray tube should be used to transmit pictures as well as to receive them.
The first successful television transmissions were carried out by the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird in Britain between 1928 and 1935, using the BBC's medium wave transmitters. Baird's system was largely mechanical and the pictures were composed of only 30 lines, so that the small details could not be reproduced. This was known as a low-definition system.
The world's first high-definition television service (using 405 lines) was launched by the BBC in the autumn of 1936.
