TELEVISION SERVICES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 December 1943, Page 4

TELEVISION SERVICES

WILL EXTEND GRADUALLY OVER WORLD. ACCORDING TO AMERICAN AUTHORITY. In the post-war era, television networks will gradually cover not only all 'of the United States, but most of the world, according to Ralph R. Beal, Research Director of RCA Laboratories. In an article in the October issue of “Radio Age,” published by the Radio Corporation of America, Mr Beal described a radically new form of “lighthouse” radio relay station developed by RCA which will make relaying of television programmes a relatively simple matter. He predicted that these unattended relay stations located 20 to 50 miles apart will not only overspread this country, but will open up a new era in international communications through development of trunk lines over such vast areas as Russia and China. “It is to be expected,” Mr Beal said, “that television stations will first go on the air in such broadcasting centres as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but there is every indication that alert broadcasters will keep pace with them in such localities as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh', Cleveland. Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha. Denver, and San Francisco. It seems logical to assume that the first television network linked by radio relay stations will be formed along the Atlantic seaboard. “But television will not be liimted to the larger cities. The radio map will be dotted with stations in cities like Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Minneapolis, Erie, Buffalo, Louisville and many others. By the use of radio relays, these, too, will become outlets for the television network which, before many years pass after the war, will weave from the east across the Mississippi and the Middle Western plains to meet a Pacific Coast link striking eastward across the Rockies. A relay station atop Pike’s Peak might well be the key station to complete a transcontinental television chain.” Mr Beal held that the radio relays can be extended to any part of the world, “through jungles, from island to island, across mountains and polar wastes.” “Just think what television trunk lines will mean to China,” he continued. “I have been there, and I feel that I know how welcome the new art of radio relaying will be to the millions of Chinese, for it will bring them communications, entertainment and education on a scale they have never known.” .