A Saga of Radio Age And Its Hero

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 32, 30 April 1927, Page 13

A Saga of Radio Age And Its Hero

Scotsman ho Leads in Race to Achieve Television BAIRD ONCE POVERTY STRICKEN One of the strangest and most exciting races that the world ever witnessed is now in progress. Eight inventors, working individually and in teams, are reaching out to clutch a prize as rich as any ever won by Edison, Bell or Marconi. They watch one another like jockeys, these eight seekers of glory and wealth —watch by studying the patents issued to each of them. The prize to be won in this technical race is that of practical television—seeing on a screen in London or New York what is happening in another city hundreds, even thousands, of miles away, says A. Clair Price in a recent issue of the “New York Times.” Thus far a thirty-seven-year-old Scotsman, John L. Baird, is in the lead. Indeed, television is actually in his grasp. He has strong, keen, able rivals in the seven inventors who are galloping behind him. Will they snatch the prize? There is Dr. E. F. W. Alexanderson, one of the great radio engineers of our time, a scientist to his fingertips, an expert in industrial research. He is perhaps Baird’s most dangerous competitor. Alexanderson is a member of the research staff of the powerful General Electric Company. He has at his disposal one of the finest industrial laboratories in the world and corporation wealth. Brains, money, facilities, organisation count in this race, and Alexanderson has them all.

Others with whom Baird must contend for supremacy are C. Francis Jenkins, known for his work in mo-tion-picture photography (he is now associated with Moore of Moore-light fame) ; Belin and Holweck of France— Belin, who developed a successful method of transmitting photographs through space; Deauvillier, another Frenchman, hard at work at television in the de Broglie physical laboratory in Paris; and the Austrian engineer, Denoys von' Milhaly, about whose progress very little is known. We have, therefore, an international contest of an unprecedented character. If we count Alexanderson as a Norwegian, although he is now an Amerrican citizen, five countries are represented. HAND-MADE APPARATUS If ever there was drama it is in this international quest of television. To think that this young Scotsman, Baird, who had to brave poverty, who began with scarcely more than a set of carpenter’s * tools, a few vacuum tubes and electromagnets, who had to make everything he needed with his own hands, should have achieved a success denied to men with millions behind them and with a technical knowledge far greater than his —surely the age of romance is not dead. From his station, 2TV —licensed by the British Post Office for radio television—Baird has transmitted images of living, moving faces a distance of nine miles. Shadows, mere silhouettes, are the best that Jenkins and Belin can show on their receiving screens. High-speed telephotography rather than television is a correct designation of Alexanderson’s present achievement.

The Scotch hero of this drama, in which the heroine is coy, elusive Television—worth winning for her own beautiful sake, not to mention the millions in hard cash that she is worth in her own right—has a face that contains more beauty than mark of physical strength. A mop of curly, corncoloured hair tumbles above a wide brow and down the back of his neck and over the collar of his rough tweed jacket. His figure is perhaps a little under the ordinary height, and he slips about his office in slippers with one sock dropping down on a bare ankle. One notes a soft, lazy, Scotch drawl impossible to reproduce in print; a manner that conveys the impression of a man who has been working under pressure all night and is at last on the verge of spilling himself into an office chair to sleep the clock around, but who is nevertheless ready to remain awake a few minutes longer if he can be of service to a visitor. That is Baird, the Scotch minister’s son, whose name promises to be linked with the names of Morse, Bell and Marconi.

Baird himself is much more interesting than his life story. His whole personality is wrapped up in a tweed jacket and television. He has never done anything striking except discover a method of television, which is very much like saying that a man who has turned the technical world upside down and inside out has done nothing else worth noting. Although Baird has not had the scientific training of some of his rivals in the race for success in television, he is hardly to be classed with the self-taught inventor of the Edison and Westinghouse type. We find him studying engineering in the University of Glasgow when war is declared — proof enough of a good technical grounding. He volunteers for service. “Physically unfit” is the verdict. He knows something about electrical engineering. There is the power-house. Men are wanted in the army. The power-house must need a man like him —one who has made a study of turbogenerators and transformers. He applies for a job and lands it. Now an active mind such as his can never be content with oiling bearings in a power-house or pulling handles on a switchboard panel. There are many things he would like to invent, but the power-house is not the place, and the period, 1914-1917, hardly the time for the execution of grand conceptions. Still, he invents something less magnificent then television. Socks. Socks for himself; for he does not like his own. He patents the socks. Who knows what commercial possibilities there may be in patented socks? The war ends. Baird leaves the power-house to become a manufacturer of socks. For a time he thrives. “Physically unfit,” the army had said. The army is right. Baird collapses. His business career is at an end. Perhaps it is just as well. Had he piled up money he might still be making socks.

He goes to Hastings, on the Channel coast to recover his health and strength. He has nothing to do but dream of inventions. Television, for example. Even in his Glasgow student days the subject had fascinated him. There was that strange element, selenium, so essential in any television apparatus of that day—selenium, which changes its electrical re - sistance with the intensity of the light that falls upon it. He thinks of using it to send images of flowers, faces, horses, whole landscapes through space. His old experiments come back to him. He obtains some selenium. In two rooms over a florist’s shop he succeeds in transmitting silhouettes —a stage as yet reached by only two or three of his present rivals. He learns soon enough that transmitting silhouettes and transmitting an image with all its half-tones, all its gradations of light and shade, are very different problems. He comes to London as soon as his health permits. It is 1923. He lives in two cheap rooms in an attic in Frith Street, in the Soho section of London, and begins a long and lonely grind. The shining brass and the exquisite precision of the instrument maker are hopelessly beyond his means. Bicycle sprockets, tins, cardboard discs and

bullseye lenses, tied together, when - —these must serve him. He has no organisation of any kind. He works alone. Between the vast reading room of the British Museum and his dark little attic in Soho he spends three gruelling years, goaded on by a scarcity of money that makes success a dire necessity. The scars of those terrible years are still upon him. and the pace at which he still works to-day is not likely to obliterate them soon. Alone in Soho he succeeds in transmitting faces—mere white ovals with mouths recognizable as such because they flicker into black when opened. In April. 1925, his great day conn He takes his crude machine to Solfridge’s, the American department store. A few visitors trickle in to see and listen. In January. 1926. he succeeds in transmitting so much detail that he ventures to invite sorn members of the august Royal Institute to witness a demonstration. Forty of them turned up. Not by the most ingenious and rigorous compression can his attic laboratory hold more than six at a time. But by transmitting from his laboratory to his bedroom and by taking his distinguished visitors in relays, he finally shows them all that he has accomplished. Success comes to him on wings that golden afternoon. Before evening all the money he immediately needs is offered. In a few weeks he moves to 1 s present laboratory in Upper St. Martin's Lane and rents a house at Harrow for his receiving station. There is nothing of the slum - Baird. Although he unhesitatingly claims, and with justice, that he is the only inventor who has ever succeeded in transmitting and receiving a living face with v he never belittles his rivals. They are neatly classified and tucked away exactly where they belong in his estimate of their ace ts. Indeed. Jenkins. Alexanderson. Belin and the rest would probably accept Baird’s sleepily uttered valuation of their achievements. ADMIRES ALEXANDERSON

Thus he is outspoken in his admiration of Alexanderson’s reduction of the time required to transmit a photograph telegraphically from 20 minutes to two. And he recognises the fact that if Alexanderson can increase the speed of transmission so that images optically chopped into several hundred thousand pieces each can be sent through space, then pieced together at the receiving station, and presented to the eye in one-sixteenth of a second, television will be achieved. From this it is clear enough what television means in actual practice. The scene at the transmitting station must be viewed at the receiving station hundreds of miles away exactly as it happens. This involves the conversion of lights and shades on a face or a flower into electric waves, which are sent to their destination either by wire or by way of the filler: the reconversion of the electric currents or waves into the original lights and shades at the receiving station, and finally the projection of these lights and shades in their correct positions on a screen for the eye to behold. The fundamental principles of all television systems are alike. Baird knows it, and so do all his competitors. Each has his own method of optically scanning a face line by line or square by square, until a face is subdivided into many thousand bits of light and shade. Each bit of light and shade falls on a device called a photo-electric cell, by which the conversion into electric currents is effected. When it is considered that the brightest bit of a face represents but an infinitesimal amount of light, the cell must be exceedingly sensitive to perform its function. The whole problem of television, therefore, reduces itself to the invention of a cell at least as sensitive as is the retina. In a very real sense his photo-electric cell is the apple of Baird’s eye. No one but he knows how it differs from other cells in use. He hugs his secret to himself, possibly because the patents by which the cell is to be eventually protected have not yet been granted. If patents are ever issued he must be prepared to fight some or possibly all of his seven rivals in court, assuming that any revolutionary discovery is involved. No invention ever leaps perfect from the brain. Minerva-like. It is an evolution. Every inventor receives seme inspiration from predecessors an I contemporaries who have described their inventions in patents. Edison is credited with the remark: “I begin where the other fellow left off,” which is another way of saying he has made a thorough study of past successes and failures before he thinks of experimenting on his own account. Baird will talk freely about every part o: his transmitter and receiver, but not of bis photo-sensitive cell. Sacred idols in Hindu temples are not more closely guarded. Never has the mysterious cell left Baird’s laboratory in Upper St. Martin’s Lane. Nobody but Baird knows just what it is?-. Although he is no longer compelled to count each penny before spending it. he still works alone —solely because the secret of that photo-sensitive cell, that artificial eye, must not be discovered.

So closely does he guard his secret that at midnight he sets his transmitter himself, dashes nine miles nut to Harrow, watches the vision on the screen, and. if an adjustment is necessary. dashes back again to London, and then returns to Harrow. This helps to explain why Baird gives the impression of a man who is physically worn out and always on the verge of collapsing Into an office chair. H® slaves literally night and day. eating and sleeping when and where he can. If Baird is overtaken and beaten in this race for the television prize, it will be largely due to his inability to take others into his technical confidence. He runs a one-man show. It may not be in him to direct a score of laboratory assistants —the method of Edison, the method of Alexanderson, the method followed by corporations that conduct research as systematically as manufacturing. Yet, despite these self-imposed handicaps, Baird stands to-day supreme in television. There is a curious parallel between the development of the first crude telephone and Baird’s first crude televisor. Alexander Graham Bell once experimented with a human ear dissected from a corpse. Baird induced a surgeon to give him a human eye. The light-sensitive substance of the human retina is "visual purple.” Baird wanted to experiment with visual purple in his effort to produce a cell sensitive enough for his purpose. He managed to construct a cell with the aid of a dead man’s eye. a more responsive cell t*han any he had used before. But the Baird cell of to-day depends on some other active substance for its delicacy of response. If Baird has achieved nothing more than the discovery of a light-sensitive reagent more powerful than any used in the photo-sensitive cells thus far invented, he must go down in the annals of technology as a great inventor.

HIS USE OF INFRA-RED RAYS If his photo-sensitive cell is new, so is his present system of illuminating the subject to be televised. Since he subdivides a face or a hand into thousands of minute fragments, and since each fragment must impress itself on the cell as strongly as possible, Baird at first used intense lights. Eve. the most hardened film actress in Hollywood would shrink from such glare. So Baird turned to invisible ultra-violet rays. They have a powerful chemical effect. Blindness is one result of over-exposure to ultra-violet radiations. Baird gave up ultra-violet and turned to the other end of the spectrum, where the infra-red rays lie. These infra-red rays are also invisible. Although the photo-sensitiveness does not respond to them quite so readily,, the infra-red rays are almost ideal for Baird’s purpose. In a sense he is already an historl-

cal personage. In the collection of early telegraph, telephone, and radio apparatus of the great Science Museum of South Kensington his first television transmitter (the one demonstrated at Selfridge’s) has its place, but without its precious lightsensitive cell. That primitive machine typifies Baird and his hard struggle w'ith poverty. The man himself seems incarnate in its wheels and tubes. A mechanic, unaware of Its historic sginlficance, would laugh at it. And yet this colllection of tins, sealing wax, jumbled wires, and crazily-mounted shafts was the first reasonably successful invention of its kind in the world —the first apparatus that ever sent the vision of a human face through space.