SEEING BY WIRE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 77, 2 April 1910, Page 9

SEEING BY WIRE.

METHOD OF TELEGRAPHING LIVING PICTURES. Something rather more tangible than television has been devised by a French inventor, Edouard Belin, who is making an apparatus by which a scries of photographs can be telegraphed oue after the other instantaneously, and reformed bo as to give a cinematograph reproduction of an event at any distance away (says the London Daily Mail). Thus if a series oi" pictures were taken of sorno event at a city such as Newcastle, they could be rapidly prepared for the telegraph, and a facsimile reproduction of the event seen immediately on a screen in London. M. Belin uses a paper photograph, of quite an original typo as the sending "record." An ordinary halftone newspaper illustration, if examined closely, is seen to consist of innumerable, dots of various sizes which combine to form the picture with its light and shade ; M. Belin's paper records consist of innumerable perforations in a' sheet of paper, each hole of a- certain size and corresponding to th© dots of a half-tone photograph. This is laid on d metal base and drawn along under a set of metal brushes ; the wider the hole, the more contact there is between the brufch and the metal underneath. By this means the amount of electric current seat to the distant viewing screen is varied. The currents of various strengths are made to illuminate more or less strongly small portions of the viewing screen, each of which corresponds to a perforation in the picture transmitted. By passing a series of cinematograph photographs under the. brushes at the transmitting station a reproduction would be seen with all the original life and motion in it. The practicability of tho idea has already been tested between a suburb of Pans' and a station in Paris itself, but M. Belin has not yet constructed a receiver capable of more than demonstrating that the idea is not a vain one. He claims that television with selenium, as used in the methods already, described, is not practicable owing to the slow.neas with which the selenium "cell" responds -to changes of light, while, his own apparatus is purely mechanical •• and, depending only on mechanical precision, should solve the problem of transmitting "living" images over the