The most mundane things that you use every day (think post it notes, rubber bands, concrete) often have fascinating stories behind them.
In fact, people often only notice how something's designed when it goes wrong. But the process of discovery, testing and prototyping anything, no matter how ordinary, is full of pitfalls and the occasional exhilarating breakthrough.
Television
Although television as we know it today is the result of many engineers' and scientists' contributions, the foundations were laid by just two men: John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor born in 1888, and Philo T Farnsworth, an American born eight years later.
Baird was the first to build a working television and broadcast the first black and white image in his workshop in October 1925. It was a cumbersome device relying on a spinning scanning disc, nearly half a metre in diameter, inset with lenses arrayed in a circle.
Completely unknown to Baird, Farnsworth had already designed a completely electronic television system with no moving parts on his classroom blackboard, aged just 14. It took a combination of the pair's ideas to successfully create a viable television system and the first public broadcasts began in 1928 in the US and 1929 in the UK.
Today the annual Australian TV industry awards are named the Logies in honour of the Scot.
Zip