Today in 1928, John Logie Baird transmitted television pictures across the Atlantic, using a short-wave radio.
The images were crude, imperfect, broken, but they were images none the less. Man's vision had panned the ocean; transatlantic television was a demonstrated reality, and one more great dream of science was on the way to realization.
The demonstration was made by the Baird Television Development Company of London, using short-wave radio sets for transmission of the ‘vision sound’ and the televisor invented by John L. Baird—who has also invented an instrument for seeing in the dark—for turning this sound back into vision after its ocean hop. The transformed vision of the man and woman in the London laboratory came through the ether in the form of a bumblebee's hum, a musical buzz or irregular cadence representing in sound the lights and shadows of their faces—all that was transmitted in the test—The New York Times, February 9, 1928.