From Attenborough’s gorilla mayhem to TV’s first gay kiss: the 100 biggest moments from a century of television

The moon landing! Royal weddings! Janet Jackson’s $550,000 nipple! As television turns 100, we charts its journey from terrifyingly dangerous to the thing that unites us

1: 1926 On 26 January John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of television to members of the Royal Institution, from his lab in Soho. The subject of the demonstration was Stooky Bill, Baird’s ventriloquist dummy, because the lighting generated too much heat for a human to bear.

2: 1930 Luigi Pirandello’s play The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, about a man dying of cancer, becomes the first drama shown on British television, broadcast live by the BBC.