Radio: Buffs

Last summer death passed across television’s little screen for the first time when NBC’s Iconoscope camera accidentally focused on a girl’s falling body, followed it six stories to the sidewalk in front of Manhattan’s TIME & LIFE Building. Last week NBC’s television mobile unit went to the bank of New York City’s East River to televise a swimming pool. When the engineer saw fire break out in an abandoned U. S. Army barracks on Wards Island, he swung his camera around, caught and sent through the air television’s first fire. Flames, smoke, a fireboat’s futile efforts to save the building all appeared on the screen, were seen in the studios by television’s first buffs.