NEW MIRACLE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20362, 20 July 1934, Page 13

NEW MIRACLE.

Television Emancipated From Studio. PORTABLE CAMERA AT FIRE. (Special to the “Star.") SAX FRANCISCO, June 26. Over the wireless comes a flash: “A general alarm —the Johnson Mills burning on the waterfront in a spectacular £O,OOO dollar blaze.*’ The listener snaps a switch and on a ground glass screen, about eight inches square little figures dance into life as a light flashes on behind the gla«s*. Watching the glass one sees lire appara* tus moving about, streams of water, flames, people running. With the picture conies a sound pick-up—the clang of gongs, shouts, the crackle of flame*.

This is television of to-day. At the scene of the fire a man with an odd device just completed in an Eastern laboratory is “picking up” the picture. It is a television pick-up camera perfected by Philo Farnsworth, a San Francisco inventor, and father of the television cathode tube, the famous “fruit jar*’ that amazed observers a year ago by spraying perfect pictures on a glass screen in exact reproduction of original subjects. The pick-up camera resembles a movie machine. It has a lens and control handles, but instead of a film, what the lens sees is fed to an electric circuit. This circuit travels through a cable that connects the .camera to a “sound” truck—in this ease a “television truck” around the corner. The man with the “camera” goes to. the centre of events. The things he and In* lens both see and hear are fed to the truck, in which is a short-wave television transmitter. This transmitter on high-frequency waves flashes the camera pick-up to a television broadcast station, and from there it is sent on other wave lengths to homes and offices. More Than Studio Transmission. Farnsworth’s pick-up camera is the latest scientific development to come out of the workshop of Television Laboratories, Incorporated. It is the logical follow-up of the “fruit jar” tube that took television from an experiment into a commercial possibility. It i 3 the first step toward co-ordinating sight-radio with news of the moment. Until the development of the pick-up camera, which repeated what it saw to a distant station, to be re broadcast to homes and offices, the most television could expect for the present was studio transmission, but the flexibility of the “fruit jar” tube Farnsworth., working in his laboratory in San Francisco, to extend the working range of television pick-ups to a radius of many miles from the transmitting studio. Television news photographers equipped with the new cameras will shortly, it is predicted, be as common as movie men. They will “cover” inaugurations, accidents, championship fights, boat races, derbies, tennis matches and riots. The ordinary person may sit at home very soon, and, through medium of these new cameras, actually witness news events as they take place. The key to the new machine and it 3 main station broadcast equipment is the “fruit jar” tube and cathode ray device, shaped like a housewife’s fruit jar, in which the television image is formed and from which it is transmitted. These longlife tubes have no filaments, are without flicker and give steady, clear image as sharp as a cinema picture. The home receiving instrument is not larger than a medium-sized wireless set. and it receives both television and radio, so-called, on the same instrument in perfect synchrony. Broadcasts Next. With the news pick-up camera apparently perfected there remains only the opening of proper television stations and the establishment of networks to put Farnsworth’s system into operation; this is all that stands between the public and television. The Farnsworth tube picks up and projects perfect images, and the newly-completed camera is ready to grab spot news shots from every field of action. A manufacturing concern has been licensed to produce the receivers for public use, and the day the transmitting station system can be financed the new miracle will be seen by the general public.