TELEVISION FOR ALL

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5341, 19 October 1928, Page 3

TELEVISION FOR ALL

BAIRD “SEEING-IN” SETS. AMAZING ACHIEVEMENTS. A few weeks ago, when the Cunard liner. Berengania was 1500 miles out at sea, the chief wireless operator on board saw his fiancee talking with other people in a room in London. He had not known he was going to see her. but he recognised her. beyond a doubt aS soon. as (her face appeared and at the Radio, Exhibition to be held at .Olympia, in September the first television instrument will be <o«n sale to the public ,a,t a price that will probably be as low as £25. AnyOjite will be able to purchase a Baird televisor, and with it witness in his home living, and moving images of actual events transmitted frop a television broadcasting station. Television, which for half a century has been the dream Q.f scientists .and investigators all cjver the world, has n;ow bec.ome a practical reality. It was loft to a British inventor, John Logie Bairfii, to bring it into the category of commercial propositions, and after, years of patient’ refeearch he sa.w his labours crowned with success, when in January, 1926, forty critical men of science, members of the Royal Institution, attended at his laboratory in a Soho attic for the first demonstration cf a Baird televisor, and to t.heir supreime astonishment witnessed living human images transmitted from one room tc> another. After that, tivo; more years; were spent by Mr Baird in developing and perfecting) his invention. During that time lie succeeded in transmitting vision o,ver telephone lines between London and Glasgow, and by wireless between London and New York. At the Radio Exhibition at Olympia in September the Bated.) televisor "’as on view. A Baird televisor, can be purchased either a? a separate instrument or in combination with a listen-ing-in set; and at cn.e and the same moment the possessor is able both to hear and see a performer at the broadcasting station. In other countries commercial progress is even further advanced than it is in England, the home of the invention,. In the United States plans are now being completed for the establishment of television broadcasting stations covering the whole cjE the United ■ States of America, Canada, and’ Mexico, and some qf these will c.ome into, operation very soon. Television, ’ which is an instantaneous process, ls not to,-be confused with photo-telegraphy, which does not transmit living, and movipg images, but merely makes by a comparatively slow process mechanical copies of photographs a.nd other records transmitted from a distance, such photographs having, of course, to be taken first in the -ordinary way by a camera,. We have- not yet assimilated Mi’ Baird’s television discovery, but he has- allied with his discoveries in, the realm of television sever,a,l other achievements of at least an equally amazing character. One of these is noc.tovisio|n, or the power of seeing in total darkness.’ At thq sumpier meeting of the British Association last year Mr Baird, demonstrated that with the a,id of invisible rays it i? possible to see a person seated in a room from which all light has been excluded. These rays,, will penetrate fog. and the use to which noctovision. can be put in war. will lie readily appreciated;