Albert Einstein was once asked if he stood on the shoulders of Sir Isaac Newton, to which he replied, "No, on the shoulders of James Clerk Maxwell," referring to the 19th century Edinburgh-born physicist whose theory on electromagnetic radiation changed the world.
The same quote could easily be tweaked for John Logie Baird to illustrate the impact of Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton. For while Baird's is a name that became famous worldwide as the inventor of the television set, it was Campbell-Swinton who laid the foundations.
An alumnus of the capital's illustrious Fettes College, Campbell-Swinton was the first person to dream up a completely electrical television system using cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) to both capture the light and display the image.
