Scientists had been working on inventing television since the 1850s, but it took a lone eccentric working with bicycle lamps, scrap lumber, and cookie tins to make it a reality.
Before his big breakthrough, John Logie Baird was a serial inventor who experienced very mixed success.
Plagued by ill health for most of his life, this son of a clergyman was declared unfit for military service in World War I.
Instead, he started working for an electric power company while maintaining a distinctly entrepreneurial spirit in his free time.
Inspired by a short story by his idol, science fiction writer H. G. Wells, he attempted to create artificial diamonds from carbon using a huge amount of electricity.
It only managed to disable part of Glasgow's electricity supply network.
As for his disastrous homemade hemorrhoid cure, it was a textbook example of the kind of activity that future TV hosts would warn against:
"Don't try this at home."
Opening of a laboratory for television experiments
With the remaining capital from the sale of the hosiery and soap companies, in 1923 he rented a modest space in Hastings on the south coast of England.
The sea air proved good for his weak lungs, but his work environment was a health and safety nightmare.
He opened a laboratory to begin experiments with television, improvising devices from scrap materials such as an old tea chest with a motor inserted into it.
At the center of Baird's system was a large disk that rotated at high speed to scan images line by line using photodetectors and bright light.
These signals were then broadcast and reconstructed to be converted into moving images.
When he succeeded in conveying the silhouette, the decades-long dream of making television came to the fore.
He seemed overly excited and a bit crazy to me at the time - William Tainton.
After Bird was electrocuted in his laboratory in Hastings, it was time for him to move to the bright lights of London.
He rented an apartment above the company at 22 Frith Street and opened a new laboratory.
His mechanical device emitted such intense heat that people found it difficult to endure its intensity.
In his experiments, he had to use a ventriloquist's dummy he named Stucky Bill.
But on October 2, 1925, this 37-year-old hired a living man as a guinea pig and achieved incredible success.
And that's where William Tainton, a 20-year-old clerk who worked on the ground floor of Baird's makeshift laboratory, enters the scene.
He told the BBC exactly 40 years later:
"Byrd rushed down the stairs excitedly and almost dragged me out of my office and up into his little lab.
"I think he was so excited at the time that he was speechless. He almost grabbed me and wanted to drag me upstairs as quickly as possible."
The first television fee in history
When Tainton found Baird's laboratory in a state of disrepair, he recounted how he immediately wanted to run back down the stairs.
First he had to get through the wires that hung from the ceiling and were scattered all over the floor.
"The equipment he was using in those days was all in disarray," Tainton said.
"I mean, he had cardboard discs with bicycle lights and all sorts of other things, and lamps of all kinds, just like old batteries, and some very old motors that he used to turn those discs."
Baird placed him in front of the transmitter: a human subject who could provide the necessary movement in a way that good old Stuckey Bill could not.
Tainton said he started to feel the heat and was scared, but Baird assured him there was nothing to worry about.
“He disappeared to go to the other end of the device to make sure he could see the image,” Tainton recalled.
"I stood in focus, but I couldn't stay there for more than a minute because of the terrible heat from those lamps, so I retreated."
For his efforts, Baird shoved half a crown (two shillings and sixpence) into Tainton's hand - "the first television fee" - and persuaded him to return to his position.
In homes around the world
To try to capture the movement, Baird asked him to crawl out and make funny faces.
In a growing panic, Tainton shouted to him that he was "being roasted alive here like a spit."
"He shouted at me, 'Hold on a few more seconds, William, a few more seconds, if you can.'
"And I did, and I stayed there for as long as I could, until I couldn't take it anymore, and I went out of focus in the terrible heat; I was very uncomfortable."
"And when it did, Baird came running from the other end of the set with his hands in the air: 'I saw you, William, I saw you. I finally got television, the first real television picture.'"
Tainton had no idea what the man meant by "television," so Baird suggested that the two of them switch places.
Tainton was glad to get away from there, "because at that time he seemed too excited and a little crazy to me."
He looked through a small tunnel to see "a tiny image about 5 by 8 centimeters in size."
He said: "Suddenly, Baird's face appeared on the screen. You could see his eyes closing and his mouth, the movements he was making with it."
"It wasn't good, you know. Everything was blurry; you just saw the shadow and the lines coming down."
"But it was a real picture, and it was moving, and that's the main thing that Baird achieved. He achieved a real television picture."
Still in the throes of excitement, Baird asked Tainton what he thought of his creation.
"I told him bluntly, 'I don't mean anything in particular, Mr. Baird. It's very raw. I could see your face, but there was no sharpness or anything else.'
"And he said, no, that's just the beginning. He said, 'This is the first television, and you'll see it in homes all over the country, in fact, all over the world.'"
On January 26 of the following year, Byrd gave the world the first public demonstration of television.
Although his pioneering machine was ultimately surpassed by technology made by companies with much better resources at its disposal, he paved the way for everything that followed.
Five years after Baird's death, in 1951, Tainton returned to 22 Frith Street for the unveiling of a blue plaque.
Sir Robert Renwick, chairman of the Television Association, told the gathering: "Although this plaque stands in the heart of London, its true monument is the forest of antennas that sprout all over the country."
And just a few years after Tainton's 1965 recollection of the cameo role he played in the history of television broadcasting, people around the world were glued to their television sets to watch the moon landing.
Science fiction has become science fact.
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