Television

For centuries men have dreamed of the eye that would penetrate stone walls and miles of space. Last week sight at a distance (television) came true. In Manhattan, in the auditorium of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Walter S. Gifford, President of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., talked to his Vice President, General J. J. Carty, in Washington, D. C. Said President Gifford, dapper, cheery: "Hello, General, you're looking fine. I see you have your glasses on." Out of the loudspeaker, General Carty's bass voice boomed: "Does it--ah--does it flatter me?" President Gifford carefully viewed the changing smiling features of the General on the glass in the yellow frame before him. "Yes," he said, "I think it's an improvement."

In Washington, Secretary of Commerce Hoover talked next. Over the telephone wires his voice, his face, the minutest movements of his lips and head were brought to the watchers and listeners in Manhattan. As he spoke into the transmitter, small circles of light moved across his face, so rapidly that they seemed to bathe it in a uniform bluish light.

The variations in light and shade, changed into electrical impulses, traveled to Manhattan over the wires. There the moving picture was reassembled. On a small screen (2 x 2 1/2 in.) the speaker's face and movements appeared distinct and clear; on a large one they were distorted badly. Later the watchers in Manhattan saw vaudeville acts broadcast from the A. T. & T. Co. studio at Whippany, N. Y., 40 miles away.

Significance: Television, requiring bulky and expensive apparatus, does not yet loom as a standard addition to the home telephone. But theatre audiences, in the not too distant future, may see super newsreels of prizefights, launchings, inaugurations, broadcast directly from the scene of the event with all their attendant noises. While not yet perfect, television had reached its highest stage of development in last week's demonstration. Engineer Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson of the U. S., with his seven beams of light, John L. Baird of England, with his super-sensitive photo-electric cell and infra-red rays, C. Francis Jenkins in Washington, Edouard Belin of France, these had hounded success for many years. But it remained for Dr. Herbert Ive's,* bearded, bespectacled chief of the Bell television research staff, to correlate the achievements of his predecessors and direct the work of many men to last week's success.

Method: To obtain satisfactory television on a large screen, 300,000 optical fragments must be transmitted and received each second. The best speed of Inventor Baird of London has been 30,000 to the second. By the new Bell system, a rate of 45,000 to a second is maintained. In the new system, as in Inventor Baird's, the object to be transmitted is divided up into many parts by beams of light flowing through a revolving disc. The variations of light and shade on the face are changed into variations of electrical current by three large photo-electric cells. Inventor Baird used one mysterious "supersensitive" cell. The varying current is then amplified 5,000,000,000,000,000 times before it is transmitted over wires or through the air by radio. At the receiving end Mr. Baird places another revolving disc. Light playing through it rebuilds the cut-up picture. In the new Bell system, the received current is carried to an electrical contact apparatus mounted on a wheel. As the wheel revolves, the apparatus makes and breaks electrical contact 2,500 times per revolution. To each contact point runs a wire which picks up a bit of the current. These wires carry the current to 2,500 tiny squares of tin foil mounted behind the television screen in neon gas. As the current reaches each bit of tin foil it leaps through the neon, which is instantly illuminated. The flashes thus made, strong or weak, according to the amount of current received, build up the picture on the screen. They arrive at the rate of 45,000 a second. Each must occur at the proper time, in the proper place and with the proper intensity, or the entire picture will be "scrambled."

Most picturesque of the fathers of television is Captain John L. Baird (TIME, Feb. 22, 1926), long-haired, bespectacled Scotsman, who gave birth to his ideas in an attic. Inventor Baird prefers baggy, woolly suits with a potent plaid; he has been so heavily handicapped by lack of money that parts of his first apparatus were improvised from dismembered bicycles, shoeboxes, wax, twine, pliers, screws, gimcracks. Last week, the manna of money fell thickly about him. A company with a capital of $625,000 was incorporated in London to exploit and perfect his process of television.

*Dr. Ives' father, Frederick E. Ives, was himself a scientist of note; invented the half-tone process for printing (TIME, Aug. 9).