Evening star., 1934-11-11
BY COVE HAMBIDGE,

Author of Time to Live"
|@HE immortal dreams Of the
worlds best liars which are
recorded in old fairy tales show
that even in the beginning men
we're persistently bothered by
the desire to do four things: To travel
through the air on magic carpet or
a winged horse; to hear what others
are talking about at a great distance;
to see what others are doing at a
great distance through a magic tube
or crystal; to become invisible when-
ever it is convenient.
In due course science got around
to these things the great liars and
poets had dreamed about long ago, and
it has made the first two Of them real
within the last few years. The fourth
it has never considered seriously; how
collect any bills If man could fade
out Of sight at any moment? The
third dream-seeing people at a great
distances called television. Some
have said it Is just around the corner.
Others have said it can never be real
lied on a really practical scale.
Pre-eminent in Television.
Now there is a man who knows GER
tainly as much as any one else in the
world about television, and perhaps
more than ary one else. and his name
is Vladimir X Zworykin. I thought
I would 60 over to Camden, N. j., and
see what Zworykin has been doing on
the technical side. and then, for the
practical viewpoint, find out from W.
r. G. Baker how far away is the corner
that television is just around. If any
where. Zworykin is a Russian-born
physicist who has been carrying on
television research for the r. c. A
Victor Co.; and Baker used to be in
charge Of research for this company,
but now, as vice president and general
manager, is in charge of research, en-
gineering, manufacturing and great
many other things. Which is siz-
able job, since the company employs
10000 persons when things are hum
ming.
The uncanny television achieve
ments of Zworykin, then, are not by
any means the only things on Bakers
mind. But they are very much on his
mind Just the same. However. before
going into this let me say that w. r.
G. Baker is a short, thin, dark, tense,
quick and extremely neat man, gleg /
the uptak', as Scot might say, and
with :he directness and force of
pile e-driver in driving his points home
when he talks No scientist or en-
gineer I can recall more thoroughly
mixes commercial acumen and astute-
ness with his science.
ParelIel in Fairy Tale.
It seemed to me-if I may go back
to fairy tales-that as far as televlslon
is concerned, Bakers company finds
itself in much the same position as the
poor fisherman in the Arabian Nights
who fished up bottle with genie
inside it. Genie was all right as long
as ne stayed in the bottle corked up
tight, but when he got out he proved
to be a fearful creature who filled the
whole sky and spoke in voice like
thunder, and the fisherman trembled
in his boots-or would have II he had
had boots. However, as it turned out,
the genie did do some very fine things
for the fisherman.
Zworykin's brand of television is the
genie in the bottle, and the question
is what it will do when 1t gets out.
Baker has thought long and astutely
about them, and my guess is that it
has brought him few headaches.
More than once, he said, they have
been on the point of pulling the tele-
vision cork. He is glad they didn't.
1t Is not a good thing for a genie to
be prematurely born
The story is something like this:
A few years ago there was great
deal Of talk about television. 1t was
supposed to be the coming thing, with
possibilities perhaps even bigger than
those that had developed from sounds
broadcasting. Then, rather suddenly.
it all petered out Competent experts
went SO far as to say that in the
complex problems involved certain
elements would make it impossible to
extend television beyond the labora-
tory.
Narrowing Experience.
This encouragement Is not to be
wondered at. I know a man who
rather regularly for a while acted as a
subject for television broadcasts. 1t
was narrowing experience. He
would stand before the television ap-
paratus reading a talk which was
broadcast along with the picture.
Meanwhile, to get the picture, a scan
ming disk moved in front of his face.
A binding light passed through little
holes in this whirling disk-holes so
arranged that the beam of light
touched his face point by point con-
secutively. These rapidly moving spots
OF light, properly reflected and focused,
built up a picture of his face which
could then be translated into electri-
cal impulses and sent out over the
air. At the receiver end they were
translated back into light and ap-
peared on a small screen. The spot
OF light moved so fast that the eye
could not follow it, and the picture
looked like single unit.
But it was pretty poor picture. It
might have been this man or a prehis-
toric monster seen through the mist of
ages, or just a mistake. The punish
ment the man went through didn't
help a bit. Glaring as the light was,
there wasn't enough of it by the time
1t got through the tiny hole, and it
couldn't stay long enough in one place.
Yet for a really fine-grained picture
the holes should have been even
smaller and closer together than they
were, but they just couldn't be.
Insuperable DifficuIty.
It was an insuperable difficulty. It
simply was not possible, with a scan
ming disk, to get anything more than a
feeble, coarse picture, with all the de-
tail lost. And in addition there were
the difficulties of short-wave broad
casting to bedevil the television ex-