PHOTOGRAPHS SENT BY WIRE

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 234, 29 June 1922, Page 5

PHOTOGRAPHS SENT BY WIRE

BELIN PROCESS DESCRIBED. M. Edouard Belin, of Paris, has recently communicated to the French' Academy of Sciences a description of the recent development in his process for transmitting photographs by telegraphy, on which he has been engaged since 1907. He claims that by his latest methods texts and photographs have been sent from New York to St. Louis, finger-prints from Paris to Lyons, and Chinese and -Japanese script over the same route. The general nature of the process as described by the London “Times,” con.sists, first, of translating variations in relief into appropriate electrical variations ; next of translating the electric variations into corresponding variations in a point of light; and, thirdly, of securing absolute synchronism between the phases of the transmitting and the receiving apparatus.

' The photograph to be transmitted is on gelatine impregnated with bichrom»te, mounted on a revolving metallic cylinder. A special microphone, carrying a stylus, reads off the variations in thickness of the gelatine print its variations in resistance corresponding with the variations of pressure. In the receiving instrument a minute point of light from a special arc lamp is focused on the mirror of a Blondel oscillograph. Variations in intensity are prqduced by using a glass screen with a scale ranging from complete opacity to complete transparency. The arrangement is such that the variations are focused on a sensitive film moving in complete harmony with the gelatine print in the transmitter. In the standard apparatus, the transmitter and receiver can be interchanged, but M.- Belin has also devised a' portable transmitter not larger than a phonograph, by which photographs of actual events have already, it is claimed, been transmitted to a French newspaper and published as. “Belinograms.”