The Recovered Images « The Dawn of TV
The September 1927 disc starts with a horizontal white bar followed by one of Baird’s ventriloquist’s dummy heads. A hand moves in to support the back of the head. After sweeping his other hand over the face, the operator moves the dummy head from side to side. The end half of the disc shows almost no movement with the exception of a hand in the lower part of the picture, adjusting part of the stand on which the head is mounted.
From Phonovision, and from two still pictures, Baird had a two different ‘Stookie Bill’ dummy heads which he used them in his experimental days as test objects. The lighting was sometimes too intense for his assistants to stay under for any length of time. This is where the Stookie Bills came into their own. It didn’t matter if they were scorched in the heat of the intense lights!
I discovered that the photograph (above left) is of the Stookie Bill head used for this Phonovision recording, as seen in the image sequence below. The better-known and older more dilapidated ‘Stookie Bill’ is the one Baird provided in 1926 to the Science Museum along with his ‘Double-8’ apparatus from 1924-25. As a result, the only ‘Stookie Bill’ that Baird had in the labs at the time of this recording is the one in this photograph.
