Facsimile Fit to Print

For many a news-conscious visitor the biggest surprise in San Francisco last week was the sight of that morning's New York Times at the breakfast table. Each day during the Republican National Convention the Times sped across the continent through new facsimile equipment, using a TV microwave relay circuit. By getting out 20,000 daily free copies of a special, ten-page, adless edition, the Times demonstrated that, technically at least, a truly national U.S. newspaper is within reach.

On Whirling Drums. The transmissions began at 4 a.m. E.D.T. from Manhattan when special page proofs of the Times's regular international edition* were placed on a revolving drum. At the same time, in a small Market Street office in San Francisco, another revolving drum bearing page-sized photographic film was made ready to roll. As the drums spun in unison 1,500 times a minute, electronic equipment carried impulses along the transcontinental circuit and converted them back into light, forming an image of the page on the film. A four-man technical crew supervised by Timesman E. Clifton Daniel Jr. (Mrs. Margaret Truman Daniel served coffee and sandwiches) rushed to develop the negatives, sent them, still wet, to a photoengraver's. The photoengravings went in turn to a printing plant.

When the Times's San Francisco edition rolled off the press, it was perfectly legible (right down to the small-type financial quotations), its photographs were only a bit grainier than usual--and its news was as fresh as any in town. Estimated cost of the five-day experiment: $75,000.

Around the World? The Times has been developing its facsimile since 1935, tried a similar long-distance experiment in 1945, when it used A.P. Wirephoto apparatus to transmit an edition to San Francisco for two months during the United Nations Charter conference. But the equipment at that time could not transmit photographic cuts effectively, and it took 34 minutes to send each page, limiting the Times to a four-page edition. Last week on equipment of its own subsidiary, the Times Facsimile Corporation, the Times's transmission produced an image four times as detailed. It took only two minutes to transmit a page, and with practice the crews whipped through a whole ten-page issue in 35 minutes, including time to change pages.

One San Francisco newsboy, eying a pile of free copies of the Times in a hotel lobby, protested Ioudly; "What a lousy trick!" San Francisco newspaper executives were more discreet, but they began some hard thinking about the future. They stressed probable obstacles to electronic distribution of a national newspaper e.g., the opposition of the typographical unions, the problem of handling local advertising. Times Managing Editor Turner Catledge who pronounced the experiment a technical success granted that the paper had not yet thought through such problems. But he said that the Times was looking ahead to distributing its editions not only in the U.S., but all around the world."

* Printed in Amsterdam and Lima from matrices flown from New York, this edition usually carries advertising, but ads were suspended during the San Francisco experiment.

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