Oldest UK television discovered

By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News

Rory Cellan-Jones meets the owner of Britain's oldest working TV

Britain's oldest working television has been tracked down in a house in London.

The 1936 Marconiphone is thought to have been made in the months that Britain's first "high-definition" television service began.

The set belongs to Jeffrey Borinsky, an electrical engineer and collector of antique television and radio sets.

He bought the set, which has a 12-inch (30cm) screen from another collector 10 years ago and is still working on restoring it to its original state.

The screen is mounted inside a wooden cabinet. The image from the cathode ray tube, mounted vertically inside the cabinet, is reflected onto a mirror.

The few controls include volume and vertical hold, but there is no channel changer, as there was only one channel when it was made: the BBC.

Modern in part

The set appears to be in good condition, but Mr Borinsky aims to replace a number of modern components with originals.

"The cabinet was beautifully restored by the previous owner," he explained,' but my aim is to gradually restore its electronics to its true 1936 magnificence," he said.

Marconi also made the "Instantaneous Television Camera" shown in 1936

But the Marconiphone 702 still works as a modern television.

It has been hooked up to a Freeview box so that it can show digital channels, although Mr Borinsky has had to install a standards converter so that a modern television signal can be seen.

Mr Borinsky only keeps the set turned on up to two hours at a time, and he uses it to view films from the 1930s and 1940s.

He says he enjoys watching the kind of pictures that might have been seen by the original owners.

The National Media Museum in Bradford has a similar set, but does not use it to show television pictures for fear of damaging it.

Iain Logie Baird, the curator of television at the museum, said it is a thrill to see the Marconiphone working.

"It's very exciting to see the image the way people would have seen it in 1936, before television became ubiquitous as it is today," he said.

Mr Logie Baird, grandson of the television pioneer John Logie Baird, says this set would have been of huge local interest when it was first acquired at a cost of 60 guineas - the equivalent of £11,000 today.

"Television was a very exciting thing, it was something that the whole neighbourhood would come over to watch. People would crowd into the home of the owner."

The set was discovered as the result of a competition run by Digital UK, the body overseeing the switch to digital television. The aim was to publicise the message that just about any television, however old, can be used to show digital channels.