SEEING BY WIRE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LVII, Issue LVII, 14 May 1910, Page 6

SEEING BY WIRE.

METHOD OF TELEGRAPHING LIV- • ING PICTURES. FRENCHMAN'S INVENTION. Something rather more tangible than television has been devised by a French inventor, Edouard Belin, who is making an, apparatus by which a series of l photographs can be telegraphed one after tho other instantaneously, and reformed so as to give a cinematograph reproduction of an event at any distance away. Thus if a series of pictu.-es wero taken of some event at a city such as Newcastle, they could bo rapidly prepared for the telegraph, and a facsimile reproduction of tho event seen immediate Iy on a screen in London. M, Belin uses a paper photograph of quite and original typo as the sending "record." An ordinary half-tone newspaper illustration, if examined closely, is seen to consist of innumerable dots of various sizes, which combine to form a picture with its light and shade; M. Belin's paper records consist of innumerab 1 © perforations in a sheet of paper, each holo of a certain size and corresponding to the dots of a half-tone photograph. A PRACTICAL TEST. This is \aid on a metal base and drawn along under a set of metal brushes; the wider the hole, tho more contact v tliere is between the brush and the metal underneath. By this means the amount of electric current sent to the distant viewing screen is varied. Tho currents of various strengths are made to" illuminate more or ltess strongly* small portions of tho viewing screen, each of which corresponds to a perforation in tho 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 the idea has already been tested between a suburb of Paris and a station in Paris itself, but M. Bolin has not yet constructed a receiver capable of more than demonstrating that the idea is not a # vain one. JHe claims that television with selenium, as usedan the methods already described, is not practicable, owing to tho\slowness with which the selenium "colß' responds to changes of light, whilo\his own apparatus is purely mechanical, and ; depending only on mechanical precision, should solve the problem, of transmitting "living" images over tho. wires.

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