VISION BY WIRELESS
ISPENT an amazing morning yesterday at Motograph -1- House, Upper St. Martin's Lane, with Mr. J. L.
Baird, who has invented a practical way of. conveying pictures over the ether. I sat before a galaxy of lights, a great disc-studded wheel began to whirr, and away in another room my face appeared to a friend. Then we exchanged places and, on a screen some six inches square, I saw the features of my friend flicker into life, apparently out of flowing crescents of light which seemed to stabilize and solidify themselves into his lineaments. It was a fair likeness, easily recognizable, and had been wirelessed to me through several walls.
Television has occupied scientists for a great many years. In 1880 it was confidently predicted that we should be able to see by telegraph. When, however, the transmitting machine came to be constructed, the light-sensitive cells failed to respond to the immense speed required and the experiment was a failure. Within the last year or two pictures have been transmitted both by telegraph and wireless, but by a system which is relatively slow, and would be inadequate to catch life and motion on the rebound, so to speak. Briefly put, the problem of television is to show on a screen in London a man speaking in Manchester and to represent his actiont as accurately as we can already reproduce his words.
There have been many workers in this field, and believe that besides Mr. Baird, who is undoubtedly the inventor of television, a Mr. C. F. Jenkins has achieved practical results, and he is only able to send shadows, which Mr. Baird could do two years ago actual objects at a distance, transmitting, for instance, a living human face with its detail of light and shade.
Mr. Baird is young—still in his thirties-and his story is an interesting one. He was trained as an engineer, and when war broke out was studying at Glasgow University for the B.Sc. degree in engineering. He offered himself for enlistment, and on being found unfit for active service, did Government work as an electrical supervisor with the Clyde Valley Power Co. until the glad day of demobilization, when he at once went into business for himself. There was plenty of money in Glasgow in those early days of optimism, also plenty of wet weather, and of both these factors the young scientist took advantage by inventing and patenting a new undersock, which for the modest sum of a florin was guaranteed to keep the feet dry ! He knew nothing of business, he tells me, but I fancy lie was born with a clear idea on which side his bread was buttered : at any rate he made £150 in the first week of putting his invention on the market. Next week he organized a force of salesmen and settled down, cautiously and philosophically, to making £200 a week and banking £195 a week, his own wants being simple. Soon he had amassed several thousand pounds. But now the menace of ill health which has often followed him in his career overtook him. He broke down and had to give up his business to go into a nursing home, with frayed nerves but a fat banking balance.
I will not trace his subsequent adventures in various parts of the world. They are a record of enterprise and ability, dogged by a weak constitution. Suffice it to say that he settled down in 1921 at a seaside resort to bring all his technical and business experience to bear on the problem of television. For two years he worked, spending all the money he had earned—or perhaps not all the money, for he comes of canny stock— in the purchase of books and apparatus bearing on his experiments. In January, 1924, he gave his first demonstration to the Press, and in April, 1925, he suc- ceeded in transmitting black and white outlines by wire- less. This was the first 'public display of television and marks a point in its history. The next step was to bring detail into the picture and clothe the dry bones of technical achievement in the flesh and blood of com- mercial practicability.
To describe Mr. Baird's " Televisor " apparatus is not easy. Imagine a big wooden wheel, inset with hundreds of large lenses. This wheel is spun at the rate of 5,000 revolutions a minute before the object which it is desired to transmit. The wheel with its lenses takes an infinite succession of photographs or impressions of the object and these impressiOns (light waves) act on a colloidal cell (a sealed tube of a colloidal solution with an electric current passing through it—this rough description will serve for the uninitiated, while the learned must be content to know that the exact specification is a secret) causing the current passing through the cell to vary in intensity. This varying electric pulse is sent over the air as other vibrations are, received and amplified as in wireless, and harnessed to a lamp, whose light, passing through the lenses of another wooden disc, falls on a screen of ground glass and reproduces the picture. Written down, this explanation may seem as clear as mud, or the statement that a fire burns because one puts a match to it.
But there it is. There is the " Televisor," and there is Mr. Baird, ready to extend our eyes, like the eyes of some inconceivably colossal caterpillar,' so that we may see what is happening in the four corners of the earth. Our ears were thus extruded years ago. The door leading out of the limitations of space is "a-jar. Soon vie shall be able to switch ourselves into the.nreserice 'Of a friend, as we can now convey our voice into a microphone. Mr. Baird did it for me yesterday, indeed. Presently our cnlv privacy will be in our own selves, in that ivory vault where consciousness lives. Even into this men prv, labelling this bit " psyche " and that " libido " and so on. But something secret remains, something
" Past the plunge of plummet In seas we cannot sound."
F. YEATS-BROWN.
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