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In January 1926, Helensburgh-born John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s first television pictures. But this was not his first successful invention.

During the First World War, he created the Baird Undersock – a product that promised to ‘keep the soldier’s feet in perfect health’. The appalling conditions in the trenches in the First World War meant that soldiers were prone to all sorts of foot infection. The Baird Undersock was a sock dipped in borax. It was so successful that it allowed him to give up his paid job as Assistant Mains Engineer with the Clyde Valley Company Power Station, described in his memoirs ‘Television and Me’ as, ‘sordid miserable work, punctuated by repeated colds and influenza’.

John Logie Baird suffered from ill health all his life and in 1916 he had been declared unfit for any military service. His daughter Diana Richardson recalls that his feet were never warm as he had bad circulation and this was impetus for the Baird Undersock.

Business started from a one-room office in St Vincent Street in Glasgow and Stewart Noble, Chairman of the Helensburgh Heritage Trust describes some of the imaginative ways that John Logie Baird marketed his product. One was to send sandwich board women out of the streets, a job that until then had only been for men.

Photograph courtesy of Malcolm Baird

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