FIRE TELEVISED

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 June 1936, Page 2

FIRE TELEVISED

FIRST OF £200,000 U.S. TESTS. An important step towards the introduction of television in the United States was taken at Camden, New Jersey, this week-end. A specially staged fire was broadcast to a room more than a mile away, where observers both watched and heard a brigade hurrying to the scene and dealing with the outbreak. This test was the first in a series on which the research engineers are Io spend £200,000 in the course of the next few months. They will experiment with a 10-kilowatt ultra-short-wave television transmitter.

This is now being installed on the top of the Empire State Building of 102 storeys which towers above the streets of New York and is the highest structure of its kind in the world. In the test of the possibilities of outdoor television made at Camden the eye of the camera—the iconoscope—was projected from a window of a room approximately 100 feet, from the fire. The bright April sunshine showed every object clearly. The spectators bn the other side of the town gathered round a screen measuring five by seven inches and saw the firemen scale ladders to extinguish the flames. The smoko and the water from the hose-pipes were equally distinct, and even details of advertising posters and trees in the back-ground were reproduced in a remarkable manner. Meanwhile, from an ordinary loudspeaker came the perfectly synchronised sounds of tire-bells, the screaming of sirens, the splash of water, the orders given by the brigade chief and the excited comments of spectators.