EVEN TELEVISION COULD BE USED FOR WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 24, 8 December 1939, Page 10

EVEN TELEVISION COULD BE USED FOR WAR

gets hold of them, an inventor’s dreams come true. Sometimes the coming true makes people remember, as the New York Times said last month about one invention, that "men and women, two centuries ago, were burned for witchcraft less amazing." Use of television in war could include: Transmission of a view of enemy land as reconnaissance *planes fly over it; almost direct vision " spotting " for artillery, landings for aeroplanes in fog with televised pictures of the landing ground, counter to fog with television through it by picking up infrared rays radiated from the earth. In the New York Empire State building, one big American radio firm, NBC-RCA, has a television transmitter with a normal eye-line range of 50 miles, G ees het of when enterprising big business To make one dream come true, engineers put a selected party on a high-flying aeroplane and took them to Washington, 200 miles away. Over Washington they climbed to well over 20,000 feet, far enough above the curvature of the earth’s surface to get on to a theoretical eye-line with the transmitter. Passengers saw, on the television screen, an NBC announcer. Then appeared the RCA president, David Sarnoff, and the president of United Airlines, William Patterson. They talked easily over the 200 miles, while a photographer in the aeroplane, at 21,600 feet, took their pictures. On the way home the television screen showed a picture of the ’plane’s landing ground. The passengers saw a ’plane coming down on to it. As their own ’plane came doWn they realised it was themselves. The Baltimore Sun said, editorially: " Whether we like it or not, we shall soon have the opportunity, so passionately besought by Bobby Burns, of seeing ourselves as others see us, with the additional blessing of seeing ourselves at the same time, and .in the same way as others see us. The philosophical connotations are terrific."