Shiers Trust Award 2012

A new biography of A A Campbell Swinton, by Dr Paul Marshall

It’s now 30 years since the Royal Television Society published Tony Bridgewater’s monograph on all-electronic television visionary Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton. The name is not one that the general public associates with the invention of television. Even in his homeland of Britain he has been over-shadowed by the very well documented and more biographically interesting figure of John Logie Baird.

With only limited material available, it has been difficult for more general works on the invention of television to elaborate on the basic facts about Campbell Swinton’s 1908 letter to the scientific journal Nature  proposing an all-electronic television system – the one  which would become the basis for Cathode Ray Tube based ‘distant vision’ throughout the world. 

Although it is this work for which he is remembered, Campbell Swinton was also deeply involved in many other engineering developments of the period, including X-Rays and the steam turbine. Bridgewater, a distinguished BBC engineer, hoped that his work might be a spur to further research. However, he would have known that deeper investigations might prove to be difficult for diverse reasons including a house fire in the Scottish Borders and a London Blitz bomb.

This new research on a subject known to be of great interest to George Shiers himself, will lead to the publication of a new biography which will hopefully reveal new material and an enhanced analysis of Campbell Swinton.