Wireless Photography

In Honolulu, a photograph was wrapped upon a glass tube. Within the tube was an electric light. Without was a photosensitive apparatus. The wrapped tube revolved slowly and the photosensitive apparatus translated light and shade into dots and dashes on a telegraph key.

The key was attached to a telegraph wire that carried the dots and dashes to powerful radio station KIE at Kahuku. There ether waves, 16,975 metres long, were given impulse as the dots and dashes came in.

In all directions around Kahuku, the ether waves flooded out. Some of them, after 2,372 miles of invisible undulations over the Pacific Ocean, impinged upon an automatic relaying set at Marshall, Calif. Without human aid of any sort, this set passed the sequence of dots and dashes, as it got them from the ether, over another telegraph line to Station KET (Bolinas, Calif.). There an operator put the ether to work again and, after tuning in to synchronizing signals, the lofty spindles of Station RCA (Riverhead, L. I.) caught up the dot-dash skein.

It would have been simple enough to fling the signals on, to Europe, to Asia, even on around the globe to Hawaii whence they had started. Instead, Station RCA brought them down into a last telegraph line, shot them in to Manhattan.

There they were introduced to an ink-moistened pen that was poised, like an old fashioned phonograph needle, over a cylinder. The cylinder revolved.

"Dot -dot -dot -dot -dash -dash -dash -dash." It was a code no man could have interpreted. But the pen made a stroke for a dot, left a blank for a dash, gradually moving to the right over the rotating cylinder. Those who watched saw black masses shape into a cap, an eye, a mustache, another eye, a shadow by the nose--it was a portrait of Admiral Robert E. Coontz, U. S. N., then in Hawaii serving as umpire in the U. S. "war game" (TIME, May 4, 11, ARMY & NAVY). When his picture was finished, the pen began again, sketched some U. S. soldiers at mess under the glaring Hawaiian sun. Six other pictures, traveling 255.85 mi. a minute, were sent from Honolulu and received, 20 minutes later, in Manhattan. The results of this longest wireless photo-transmission were said to be clearer than any obtained in some London-to-Manhattan tests made last fall.