Norman Stokes built an early mechanical television from parts that barely sound like they belong in the same room. His 1931 Televisor used an old car cylinder, the framework of a model-train truck, wire netting, pieces of tin, cigar-box wood, Meccano components, an old clockwork mechanism, and a torch lens. He followed John Logie Baird's mechanical design specifications, but the improvised construction was his own.

Stokes was a self-taught teenager from Southend-on-Sea. In April 1931, he brought the machine to the third Television Society Exhibition in the physics laboratory at University College London. The Science Museum Group records that society members were impressed by both the set and his understanding of the still-new technology.

The object later traveled from specialist exhibition to department-store display. By the end of the year, Selfridges asked to borrow it for “Schoolboys' Week” in its Radio and Television department. The set had begun as a collection of salvaged shapes—a cylinder, toy framework, boxes, clockwork, and lens—and ended up demonstrating television in central London.

Early television is often pictured as a polished cabinet arriving from a factory. Stokes's machine preserves a messier stage: a working image system assembled by a teenager who could look at a car part, a cigar box, and a toy construction kit and see components of a screen.