TELEVISION

Evening Star, Issue 19352, 11 September 1926, Page 13

TELEVISION

In a darkened room in London on a .screen a representative nf I.no ‘(.hristiau Science Monitor ’ recently was able to see t lie head and features of a man who, he knew, was in n room on ihe floor above. This presentment, while admittedly crude, and not yet efheeini enough to he of use commercially, proves that, television is possible, and was an enormous advance on the results which the writer saw about a year ago. And so the listener-in may look forward to seeing-in, and doubtless later to doing both together. The inventor is a Scotsman, Mr John Baird, and he has been working on the televisor for over four years, and thinking of it for much longer. When the writer first mot him he was working in a little attic in Soho, at a grave disadvantage for waul of funds and putting his all into his invention. The lenses "’which he used on his rotating disc; were, the bull’s-eye glasses of old bicycle lamps, and other portions of his gear looked a* if they were wade to match. Things are better now, but much remains to lie done before one can go into a shop and buy a televisor with the certainty that one will bo able to use it to sce'clearly what is being transmitted by a roarhine at a distance-. In the same way that in the early days of the cinematograph the screen looked as if it was covered with falling rain, so at present, with the televisor, the imago is marred with dark bars mhving across the screen. This, Mr Baird explained, was due to lack of speed of rotation _ of the disc which carries the combination nf lenses. The “seers-in” were allowed to say what they washed the face at the transmitting end to do—that, is, wink, put the tongue out, smile, turn protile. and so on —thus proving to their satisfaction that they were really taking part in a demonstration of television. At present, the traversal of the screen is made in one-tenth of a second, and as an impression lasts on the retina of. the eye for a period nf from one-fiftieth in' nne-thirtieth of a second the effect is that the'image on the screen is seen apparently instantaneously.