“TOURING” AT HOME

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 515, 19 November 1928, Page 13

“TOURING” AT HOME

TELEVISION POSSIBILITY PROFESSOR BURBIDGE’S IDEA Touring foreign countries without eaving one’s own home-town was a possibility of television suggested by Professor Burbidge in an address to the Rotary Club to-day. The speaker said that the transmission of outlines over telegraph lines was possible 20 years ago but it was not it commercial proposition. Now a British business man might send his signature by radio to New York. The transmission of outlines was made by the use of an electric eye which was more sensitive than the human eye. This eye, travelling over a photograph, turned its vision into an electric signal. The receiving apparatus must be synchronised with the transmitter and it changed the signal into light again and transferred it to a sensitive film or paper. In Vienna it was possible to send a coloured picture to Berlin, a distance of 350 miles. Colour transmission was a step beyond the outline transmission. Television itself, or the transmission of moving objects, was more difficult still, as the electric eye had to traverse the object 16 times every second—the speed required in cinema projection. This meant sending 160,000 signals over the wire or through radio each second. The speeding-up had been accomplished. Professor Burbidge said that the possibilities of television were that election scenes, football matches, boxing events would be sent to viewers any distance away. Business men would be able to see the faces of the men they were talking to in other parts of the world. The greatest future of the invention was that it would help a great dea-l in international education, so that one would be able to realise foreign countries without travelling to them.