[Synchrodyne]

Whilst the exact meaning of “scientist” in the banknote portrait context might be hard to pin down, I think it would be a big stretch to include Baird in even the loosest definition. His reputation appears to have been a case of “when legend becomes fact, print the legend”, to borrow the movie line. Nevertheless, W.J. Baker provided a pleasant summary in his book “The Young Man’s Guide to Television”, see pp.83-85. In that he did include the comment “As a theoretician Baird does not rate highly…”

P.P. Eckersley, writing in Wireless World 1959 April (p.175) was more direct. He said: “Baird stood above his contemporaries in imagination, but, as events proved, below them in knowledge.” Eckersley also said ‘A recollection of Baird is of him throwing his hands in the air, crying “Don’t talk to me of sidebands!” – it was just was I was talking to him about. How fatal to hopes are the brutal facts of physics’.

Thus Baird was a long way from being a scientist, and on that basis not a contender for the £50 note. If there is ever a category for misguided Don Quixote-like folk heroes, then he might be a front runner. He may certainly be credited with pursuing his goal against all odds, but he chose the wrong pathway with his mechanical scanning system, when all others in the field were working towards the practical realization of Campbell Swinton’s all-electronic idea of 1908. That I think qualifies as something of great technical imagination. As I understand it, Campbell Swinton was an engineer, but his proposal was published in the scientific journal Nature, so perhaps he was a scientist as well. Staying within the early TV field, then what about Blumlein? I am not sure whether he was a scientist, an applied scientist or an engineer; probably something of each, but he certainly made a huge contribution.

Tesla might not qualify for inclusion on a British banknote, but he was also an enigmatic figure with a surrounding mythology. In popular culture Tesla and AC often seem to be conflated, despite the fact that AC per se was a flourishing technology before he entered the field. His contribution was polyphase AC, although he was not the first to propose it. But having helped to get the polyphase concept moving, he seemed not to want to develop it much, staying with the two-phase and split-phase concepts. It was left to Steinmetz of GE, a virtual unknown in popular culture, to do the hard work of developing the mathematics (involving an early applied use of complex numbers) of the more efficient three-phase system, which then soon became the polyphase norm. Edison had a commercial reason to oppose any form of AC, and at times he was quite ridiculous about it, but his resistance was futile, and the matter had been pretty much settled by the time Tesla arrived on the scene.


Cheers,