J B Williams "Pinsk to the Palace" PDF

John Logie Baird invented television. This is a common misconception as the ideas reach much further back and the successful system of television in Britain owed nothing to him. If not him; who was responsible? The answer is a name few have ever heard – Isaac Shoenberg. He created, inspired and led the brilliant Marconi-EMI team that did produce the first real high definition broadcast television system in the world.

Growing up as a Jew in Pinsk on the endless plains of Eastern Europe, he was educated and worked within the restraints and chaos of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dodging strikes, pogroms and revolution he married and started a family while still a student, and despite parental opposition. Taking a chance he joined another young man, Semyon Aisenstein, in building some of the first wireless telegraph stations in Russia. This was very successful and their enterprise became a large organisation before being taken over by the Marconi Company.

Then in 1914 he gave up his good job and brought his young family to London so that he could undertake further study. But as the First World War broke out, he soon had to seek employment and worked his way up from a junior patent clerk to a joint general manager of the Marconi Company in ten years.