TELEVISION IN EFFECT

Taranaki Daily News, 9 April 1927, Page 13

TELEVISION IN EFFECT

PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION INSTRUMENT OF WARFARE SEEING MILES BY RADIO By Telegraph— Press Assn—Copyright. Received April 8, 7.30 p.m. * I New York, April 7. The first public demonstration of television, or the visible radio, was held at tho laboratory of the Bell Telephone Company. A group of 50 men simultaneously . heard and saw Mr. Hoover deliver a radio address from Washington. The invention is the work of Francis Jenkins, a Washington scientist, who is now working on a machine to be carried by aeroplane in time of war, to take impressions of the landscape over which it is flying, and transmit the same 100 miles back to a protection screen at headquarters. Jenkins invented the modern cinema projection machine, also the transmission of still pictures by radio instruments now in use, by which weathermaps can be transmitted from the shore to ships at sea, The same experiment was also repeated by telephone wire, with equal results, the synchronisation of the speaker’s voice and actions being extremely life-like, although verisimilitude was more nearly approached when the picture was projected on a small screen. Eighteen pictures per second were projected a distance of 250 miles on a screen, two by three inches, then on a screen two by three feet, after which Vice-President Gurty, of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Washington, conversed individually with New York, looking each other straight in the eye, while upon the screen before him, he saw the individuals whom he addressed.

This was followed by the projection of a variety entertainment from a study in New Jersey into New York by wireless. This is a much shorter distance, and the effects were excellent. The officials declined to discuss the commercial prospects of television, indicatiiif,, however, that the greatest possibilities would be in the field of entertainment.