Technology History | 22 Frith Street — The First Audience Watched a Dummy's Head

The blue plaque is up and to the right of the neon, above the first-floor windows, and it is the only thing on the front of the building that mentions television. On 26 January 1926 John Logie Baird showed moving images with light and shade in them to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times, in rooms he had rented here since 1924. Accounts of the audience differ. Contemporary retellings say forty; the University of Strathclyde's centenary account last January says around fifty. Accounts of the room differ too. Most say the attic; the engineers' milestone plaque says he used the first floor as his workshop. The picture they saw was thirty-two lines at five frames a second, scanned by a disc with a spiral of holes in it, a design patented by Paul Nipkow in 1884 that Baird did not invent and did make work. The breakthrough itself had come three months earlier, on 2 October 1925, when the head of a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill came through with recognisable features rather than as a silhouette. Baird went downstairs, fetched a twenty-year-old office worker named William Taynton, sat him in front of the apparatus and paid him half a crown. What this was, precisely, was mechanical television, and the qualifier matters because the system everyone eventually watched was electronic and came from other people. The BBC used Baird's system from 1930 and dropped it in early 1937. Bar Italia has had the ground floor since 1949, run by the Polledri family, and the building is listed Grade II. The London County Council put the blue plaque up in 1951. A second plaque went up in January 2026 for the centenary. Photo: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons