THE FLYING SPOT

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 86, 8 October 1931, Page 22

THE FLYING SPOT

TELEVISION AS SEEN The Jenkins Television Corporation, which makes television sots, has sold about twenty-fivo hundred of them in the past, year and a half, says a writer in "ThoNcw Yorker." Pcopjc have them' in their homes—engineers, dab- ' crs, optimists, believers in the future of television. A set, as you may know, ig. like a radio cabinet, dials and all, except that in place of a soundemitter it has a lens the size of a pic pan. You sit in. a chair, twirl the dials, look through the lens, and if all goes well images appear on a screen about eight inches square on the other side of the lens. Sots can be bought at several of the department stores. Tho National Broadcasting Company just broadcasts its television signature, WXZ- or W4Y, or whatever it is, and sometimes the figure of a cat going round and round in a circle. , It keeps using the wave length merely to hold its franchise. : Columbia, on the other hand, '.broadcasts singers and speakers and piano players every evening. The images are synchronised with sound; you see a tenor's lips move and hear his voice. That is, if you've tuned in properly. Columbia gets five or six fan letters a day. One man in Toronto and another in Chicago wrote that they got New York programmes on their sets. Oiie night last week Columbia broad-cast-two" prize fighters in action, to give its public some idea of what it will be seeing in a "few years. With a, dozen other people we watched the shadowy images of Benny Leonard and another boxer on the small screen of a receiving set. Only about two people can really see comfortably into the present set; the others have to bend and duck and crane their necks over tho lucky one's shoulders. The fight wasn 't' very good. Tho boxers had to stay inside a space about five feet square and you could spc them only from their waists up. Now and then there'd be a clear picture; then the pugilists would appear to bo groping in a fog or chasing each other in a tank of milk. Faces and arms dilate and contract and look crazy, liko images in those trick mirrors at amusement parks. Lighting is a major difficulty. For the last round, wo went up into tho room where the fight was going on. It was' about the size of a bathroom and dark. ■■•..' Out of a small glass-enclosed control-room a finger of light /plays upon the figures of the performers. If it w;ere allowed- to comfc to a full/top, it would be just a spot as big as a thumb nail, but a disc with sixty holes in it whirls in front of the line of light, scattering it.' This light, reflected back from the ,body of whoever is being televised, is' registered, after a lot of little miracles, on the screen of a receiving set. Right how it's hard to get more than two persons in a picture. Four or fiv<> would have to stand back so far that they wouldn ?t reflect tho light strongly enough. Performers have to bo made up like movie actors, with grease, paint, and lipstick.