Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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John Logie Baird's first television, 22 Frith Street

The upstairs room in Soho where television was first shown to the public, in January 1926; Bar Italia is downstairs.

Statues & plaquesFree

Baird rented two attic rooms above what is now Bar Italia and on 26 January 1926 gave fifty members of the Royal Institution the first public demonstration of television, a flickering thirty-line face of his office boy on a screen the size of a postcard, made with a spinning disc, bicycle parts and a hat box. The plaque is on the front; the espresso bar below has been there since 1949 and keeps a photograph of him on the wall.

Where
22 Frith Street, W1D 4RP
Nearest station
Tottenham Court Road · 3 min walk

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