John Logie Baird's Mechanical Television

Baird got further than that. His system was used to broadcast Wimbleton tennis matches at least once. There was even a theater-sized receiver, with a huge array of neon lamps and a big mechanical commutator to scan them.

The real loss was Scophony.[1] That was a mechanically scanned system with a much brighter image. Circa 1938. WWII cut off work, and after WWII, CRTs were working better.

[1] http://www.televisionexperimenters.com/scophony.html

Wow, this was really interesting, I had no idea there was a pre-Farnsworth television industry.

As I was reading it I was really expecting it to end with him being immediately destroyed by the introduction of CRT, but it was pretty inspiring to see that he embraced the new technology, learned from it, and built upon it.

There is a community around this in England: "Narrow Bandwith TV"(http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/)

Enthusiasts build working full size replicas.

A "build it yourself" kit ("Televisor") was available (basically a snap-together kit) which comes with a CD with "video" recorded as MP3, you hook up your phone (or computer) to the kit with an audio cable and you can actually see the ghostly moving images. Syncing is iffy but it does work.

There are some restored recordings of Baird broadcasts here: http://www.tvdawn.com/

They were unreplayable at the time (i.e. there was no way to show them on a Baird Televisor) but have been digitally read and turned into GIFs.