Last summer the skilled hands of RCA-Victor Co.'s Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin fashioned the closest known approximation of the human eye (TIME, July 10). Designed for television, the device was called the iconoscope. On 20 square inches of mica were 3,000,000 dots of photosensitive material. Light falling on the mica set up an electromagnetic tension which was discharged by an electron beam. The changing pattern of this discharge could be transmitted by radio. At the receiving end the image was reproduced on a fluorescent screen by a reversal of the iconoscope's operating principle.
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