Television Impasse

"There are 17 million families ready to purchase television receiving sets. They are waiting for the engineers to come through."--Harry Boyd Brown, merchandising manager of Philco Radio, to Manhattan's Sales Executives Club last week.

"We [Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc ] now feel that further operations with the present facilities offer little possibility of contribution to the art of television, and we have decided to suspend temporarily our program."--Edwin K. Cohan, Columbia's technical director, explaining why Columbia discontinued television service last week.

The two statements pithily reflect television's current state. The U. S. has about 20,000 sets. Scanning devices to translate, scenes into electromagnetic waves are satisfactory for experimental purposes. But transmission fails.

Despite Columbia Broadcasting's discontinuance, R. C. A. Victor, General Electric, Westinghouse and a few other broadcasters of experimental television will keep on.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.