Peeping Tube

In George Orwell's bestselling shocker Nineteen Eighty-Four, the inhabitants of his frightful dictator state are spied upon day & night by all-seeing television eyes. Great posters remind them that "Big Brother is watching you."

With the television equipment in general use today, this sort of supervision is hardly practical. The "eye" of conventional television is an image orthicOn tube 14 inches long and 3 inches in diameter, usually mounted in a monstrous camera as big as a salesman's suitcase. The size and complication of the image orthicon would keep television from any use as a hidden, unwinking eye.

At last week's Manhattan convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Radio Corporation of America showed a tiny, bright-eyed tube, the Vidicon, which would just suit Big Brother's purposes. It is hardly larger than a hot dog (1 in. by 6 in.) but it already sees as well as the clumsy, expensive ($1,000) image orthicon.

The Vidicon works on a new principle.

Inside its flat glass front is a layer of transparent material that conducts electricity. Behind this is a layer of a "photpconductor," i.e., a material that conducts electricity only when light is shining upon it.

A lens focuses the scene being viewed on the front side of the photoconductor. A slender beam of electrons from an "electron gun" scans the rear side of the photo-conductor. When the electrons hit a brightly lighted area, a lot of them pass through. When they hit dark parts, only a few of them pass through. The transparent conducting layer collects the escaping electrons and passes them on in the form of a "video" current whose rapid fluctuations represent the light and shade of the picture. An ordinary television set turns the current into a copy of the scene which the Vidicon is viewing.

Compared with the image orthicon, which is packed with intricate entrails, the Vidicon is a dream-tube of electronic simplicity. It already sees well in ordinary indoor light, and RCA thinks that it can be made ten times as sensitive as the image orthicon. If so, the Vidicon should be able to see in near-darkness.

RCA did not develop the Vidicon primarily for house detectives and G-men. It was aiming at the important field of "industrial television," where the Vidicon will have vast importance. In the roaring, naming innards of modern industry there are many goings-on too dangerous for human eyes to watch. A cheap, expendable Vidicon can creep up close to a new machine being tested "to destruction." It can brave the flood of gamma rays from a nuclear reactor. It can ride on a guided missile or watch the detonating mechanism of an atomic bomb. Up to the time when it "dies," the faithful tube will report what it sees to distant human watchers.

Less heroic jobs for the Vidicon may be even more useful. An array of the tubes can watch all the aisles of a factory for the plant manager. They can help store detectives keep multiple eyes on shoplifters. One watchman equipped with Vidicons can watch simultaneously many parts of his territory.*

At present, a television "eye" must send its information over a complicated cable; ordinary insulated wires will not carry high-frequency TV current. But a new development described last week by Dr. G. Goubau, a German scientist employed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, may do the trick. Dr. Goubau covered a single wire with a special insulating material and strung its end through a conical metal horn, which "launches" the current. This "G string" (named for Dr. Goubau's initials) carries a television current efficiently under some conditions. The Signal Corps hopes that it will eventually carry television programs into people's homes. By 1984 the G string and the Vidicon may be cheap and effective enough to carry their snooping to the office of some unhappy nation's Big Brother.

* For news of another new TV tube see BUSINESS.

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