ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19917, 10 April 1928, Page 11

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.

A MOVING PICTURE FEAT. SUCCESS IN TELEVISION. BRITISH INVENTOR'S TEST. England has secured priority in transmitting a moving picture across the Atlantic, says the Morning Post. The achievement is due to Mr. John L. Baird, a Scottish inventor, the engineer responsible for the foundation of the Television Development Company at Long Acre, London. What ho actually did on the night of February 8 was to transmit three images, the figure of a dummy and then the moving features of a woman and of a man from the centre of London to Rartsdale, Now York. Mr. Baird's results can fairly be compared with the early successes of Marconi, except that they are more dramatic. Two years ago Mr. Baird demonstrated to the Royal Institution in his premises in St. Martin's Lane that he could transmit the & ' image of a living face by wireless telegraphy from one room to another. "Since then," Mr. Baird explained to an interviewer, "I have been perfecting the apparatus. The main difficulties have been those inseparable from wireless. We have been working on a very low power, and night after night transmission has been interfered with by atmospherics and other adverse conditions. Many a night we have tried to get across and failed. "Last night, however, proved ideal. We had the dummy posed before the electric lights, and we received from Captain O. G. Hutchinson the terse message in Morse 'O.K.' For tho dummy we substituted the living busts of a man and a woman. They spoke and moved, and their movements were received in New York just as they were received two years ago when I was working from one room to another in St. Martin's Lane. The Studio Made Visible. "All along the problem has been one of wireless. We could to-day offer to the public an apparatus by means of which anyone in our studio could be seen, just as anyone in the British Broadcasting Company's studio can be heard. I can add nothing to my original statement made some months ago that the public will shortly be able to buy an apparatus for some such price as £3O with which they will be able to see the artists in our studio. It is our policy, however, not to make these available until the results are such that the cause of television cannot be discredited." Mr. Baird's laboratories in Long Acre, from which the transmission was effected, have been undergoing rapid transformation. The transmitting room itself, where his somewhat lurid dummy stands ready to be retransmitted according to order, has as its essential feature a battery of electric lights. Near by is another room packed with electric cells, and beyond that the hush-hush department, in which a new machine is being built very different from the three-ply wood wheel with its staggered lenses that, brought television into being. Reception in Hew York. A message from Hartsdale, New York, states the demonstration there of the transmission of "vision sound" across the Atlantic resulted in a clear vision of the dummy in Mr. Baird's studio in London, and less clear images of a living man and woman. The woman's image was broken and scattered. It was not so clear as that of the man, but it was plain that the picture was of a woman and there was no question that she moved her head, so that first her full-face was visible and then her profile. It* was impossible, however, to distinguish her features. Captain Hutchinson, of the Baird Company, and Mr. Clapp, the company's engineer, stated after the test that if the experiment was so successful with so little power, it was reasonable to suppose that in a very short time, by the. use of more powerful transmitting sets, Transatlantic television would be as clear as it had been in tests over short distances.