Who's Holding Television Back?

WHO’S HOLDING TELEVISION BACK?

GIANT CORPORATIONS SPEND MILLIONS TO PERFECT “RADIO MOVIES” — STILL SOMEBODY, SOMETHING, DEFIES THEM!

By Alton Cook

(from Radio Guide, week ending Feb 6, 1937, pp. 3, 45)

Two of radio’s huge corporations are staking their biggest brains and fantastic chunks of their money on the wildest, most extravagant gamble science has ever undertaken.

Their prize—if they win—is television, and a good chance that the new device will plunge the whole radio business back into the chaos we used to call “radio’s infancy.” If they lose—if the big brains and the big chunks of money can’t beat the technical obstacles—radio can proceed along the comparatively orderly paths it now is following.

With these stakes what they are, maybe it is not wild to suspect that the heads of the huge corporations sometimes look wearily into the future and hope that the sums lavished in television are being spent in vain. But they don’t dare stop. If one corporation stops, the other will carry on—or if they both stop, there will be eager brains and financiers abroad, perhaps others here, to pick up the task. There is no quarter.

Everything about television is staggering in its proportions—the cost of its development, the incredible complexity of the process, the unprecedented sums that will be needed to give the industry its start if television ever does go into its commercial phase. Just what point of development must be reached to make television commercial or when that will happen are guesses no one close to the industry will hazard. The optimistic place it years away.

In the laboratory, television already is a reality. It has been for years. Two powerful new television transmitters are in daily operation: one in Philadelphia, the brain-child of Philco and its youthful genius, Philo Farnsworth; the other at the top of the Empire State building in New York, an extravagance financed by the Radio Corporation of America with Dr. Vladimir Zworykin as head of the invention and experiment corps. Both operate in strict secrecy. They transmit their pictures through the air, but the secret is kept because there are only a handful of receivers in existence to pick up the faint impulses and change them into recognizable images of the original pictures.

Every two or three years each of the corporations cautiously has invited a few outsiders, scientific and journalistic, to see what state the experiments have reached. Carefully minimizing the importance of the whole thing, RCA last summer showed off the green-and-white pictures its television produces.

The visitors were divided into two parties, one at a receiver and the other at the transmitter. First we watched Frank Mullins, an RCA publicity man, stand under a battery of hot, blinding lights, talk casually and smoke a cigarette. Some ten feet away from him was the television camera, shaped approximately like the large-size cash-registers seen in department stores. An operator, eyes glued to a sighting range, manipulated the controls.

Then the Klieg lights went out, the camera was wheeled to a window and its nose turned on some firemen about a hundred feet across a courtyard. The firemen climbed ladders and turned hoses on smokepots burning for the occasion. The controls were moved again and the camera trained on traffic passing over a bridge, about three hundred yards away. For the rest of the transmission, the camera was wheeled away and a motion picture sent out over the air. A standard movie projection machine was used with a special head containing the same sending apparatus used in the camera.

Driving the couple of miles to the receiving station, we went into a dimly lighted room and found two television receivers that looked exactly like medium-sized cabinet radio sets. They had about a dozen dials, each of which had to be carefully adjusted to bring the picture into clear focus.

The top of the set lifted back as it would on a radio set with phonograph attachment. Instead of the phonograph record turntable, there was a hemisphere resembling the end of a huge electric-light bulb, some eight inches in diameter. That was the iconoscope. The picture appeared on the end of the iconoscope, could be watched there directly as one leaned over the top of the set. The picture was reflected also in a mirror inside the lid of the set and could be seen from a circle of chairs a few feet away.

In the mirror appeared a greenish Mr. Mullins, talking again and smoking another cigarette, calling attention to the fact that the cigarette smoke was plainly visible. The firemen obligingly climbed their ladders again, repeating their part in the demonstration. It was a sunny day but the picture was comparatively dark. Features of the firemen could not be distinguished but the distinctive shape of fire hats was clearly discernable.

When the traffic on the bridge was shown, the difference between a sedan and a truck was plain, but it was impossible to tell whether the sedan was a Ford or a Lincoln. The most satisfactory part of the demonstration was the transmission of motion pictures. It was not as good as theater projection, but it approached the standard usually achieved at home with a moderate-priced camera and projector.

In all the pictures there was some flickering, occasional blackout and now and then a blizzard of white dots. The dots are what crackling static does to the television picture.

This was television under the most favorable conditions—laboratory conditions. It was not perfect, but assuming television arrived in homes tomorrow, it would be adequate. Adequate, anyway, until novelty wore off.

The final session of RCA’s demonstration was another meeting with Mullins and Zworykin. All the visitors were cautioned not to take the show too seriously. Optimistic talk about television would cut heavily into the sale of radio sets and RCA is in the radio-set manufacturing business.

Not long after that, Philco opened its doors and the same selected observers were permitted to see what Farnsworth, brainy assistants, and huge outlays of Philco cash had accomplished. In performance they have achieved about the same level as has RCA. The methods of sending and reception differed considerably, but to the observer the main difference was that Philco’s television pictures were yellowish instead of greenish. Talk in the Philco plant is less conservative than it is at RCA, but they make it emphatic that television is nothing to count on immediately. Philco is a radio set manufacturer, too.

This conservative spirit is understandable from a propaganda standpoint. A casual examination of the hurdles television still faces makes the pessimistic attitude seem justified. In fact, one wonders why hard-headed businessmen lavish money on such a visionary thing at all.

In the first place, no progress has been made toward overcoming television's biggest technical bugaboo. Television must use radio’s ultra-high frequencies: the short waves—so short that your short-wave radio set is not equipped to receive them. These ultra-short waves, unlike the waves used in standard commercial broadcasts, do not follow the curvature of the earth. They go straight to the horizon and slip off into space. Consequently, a television station will not transmit farther than a man with field-glasses can see from the top of the station’s antenna.

Twenty-five miles would be an absolute limit. Fifteen to eighteen miles is what is usually achieved. Who will finance the construction of television stations at intervals of thirty miles or less through all the densely populated sections of the country?

Network television broadcasts are prohibitively expensive. Ordinary telephone lines will not carry television as they carry radio. A special cable has been devised—the coaxial cable. One has been strung between New York and Philadelphia because it could be used for multiple telephone messages. The cost for those ninety miles was in excess of a million dollars. Still, if Chicago and New York were to watch the same television show, a similar cable would have to be strung straight across the country and reserved for television.

Zworykin recalled the early days of radio, when any bright youngster with a screw-driver, a pair of pliers and thrift enough to save part of his allowance could build a little radio set. Not a good radio set, perhaps, but good enough to interest Father and Mother in this new device to bring music into the living-room without getting up to change the records.

“There won’t be many amateurs tinkering with television,” Zworykin went on. “At least not until we can modify the construction a good deal. Television sets are too complex for any tinkerers except advanced technicians. I’m afraid it’s going to take a lot longer to get television sets marketed than it took for radio.”

Any guess about the cost of sets is a mere conjecture. So much of the equipment is made only in small quantities on an experimental basis, that it is impossible to say exactly what economies could be achieved under quantity production. It is clear, though, that the smallest-size television receivers, showing a picture perhaps four inches square, are not likely to appear on the market for less than $300—and engineers scoff at placing the figure that low.

The tube on which the pictures appear Zworykin’s iconoscope or Farnsworth's cathoray tube, can be obtained now for around $100. But the tube is highly perishable. Its ultimate life is one thousand hours at most.

Let us assume that when television does appear on the market, that indispensable tube will be down around $25, certainly a limit in optimism. It will last two months. How many families will be willing to undertake such constant expense of replacement?

Authorities on television evade this question—but there is some talk that television without wires is not likely to become a reality. It may be handled by the telephone company. A receiver is installed in your home. You call to see what tonight’s program is and you pay a service charge if you want it.

Reception of television is possible only in a darkened room and it must be watched closely. It will never be a satisfactory accompaniment for reading, bridge games, conversation, or the morning housework.

Sum up all these obstacles and it’s easy to see the gallant courage of the men who stubbornly carry on the visionary experiments. So much remains to be done!

For the recent opening of RCA’s new television transmitter in New York’s Empire State building a brief variety show was staged. After a whole evening of rehearsal; the show was received on about a dozen transmitters.

The next step with that expensive new transmitter is immediate dismantling and modernizing. After only five months of operation, engineers have discovered new factors to make it obsolete. All the receivers built to pick up the picture go into obsolescence with the transmitter.

The end of such rapid change is not yet in sight and each change must be approved not only by engineers but by the Federal Communications Commission. By the time final approval comes for one change, engineers are busy experimenting with another.

The static-ridden air of New York City has confronted television with another bugaboo—though this one was expected. Doctors’ diathermic apparatus, very good for the health, perhaps, simply ruins a television picture with static. Of course, the remedy for that is not scientific. It must come through legislation requiring proper shielding for all electrical equipment that might produce static.

There you have what the world has been permitted to know of television. Maybe they have been holding something back. But if you have a vacant corner in the living-room, don’t count on a television set to fill it. At least not for a long time.

(Eric's note: Created March 15, 2004. This piece is assumed to be in the public domain as the renewal required under the old copyright rules was not found in Library of Congress records. Any evidence to the contrary can be sent to enwilson(AT)gmail(DOT)com. I'm a scrounger, not a thief.)

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