Stooky Bill

Stooky Bill was the name given to the head of a ventriloquist dummy that John Logie Baird used in his early experiments to transmit a televised image between rooms in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street London. Stooky Bill's visage ("stooky," also spelled "stookie," is Glaswegian slang for someone who is wooden in his movements; it is also a colloquial name for a plaster cast used to immobilise bone fractures.) The incandescent lights illuminating the subject to be televised generated so much heat that Baird couldn't use a human for the long term testing and so Stooky Bill was adopted. The exaggerated smiling black and white features of the dummy's face were necessary for the early trials and eventually the hair became singed and the painted face became cracked by the heat of so many light bulbs.

External links

* [http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/david_hall/stooky_bill_tv.html About John Logie Baird's experiments]