While radio fans were tensely listening for voices overseas, the Radio Corporation of America was straining its eyes to see across the Atlantic.
After several days experimenting with a device on which 22 months of labor had been spent, the public was at last permitted to see the results. Photographs were turned into radio impulses, were shot across the sea from Carnarvon (Wales), were picked up in the U. S. and the pictures reproduced.
The device used for the sending was similar to that used last May for transmitting pictures by telephone (TIME, June 2). It consisted of a cylinder in which a photographic negative is placed. A beam of light strikes the cylinder which slowly rotates. Passing through the film it activates a photo-electric cell. The cell gives out electrical impulses in proportion to the strength of the light that filters through the film. The gradations of these electrical impulses are very delicate. If put upon the air, static would greatly interfere with them. Instead they are stored until a given amount (two-millionths of an ampere) accumulates. Then it is discharged as a sharp dot with which static does not interfere. Thus static is eliminated and the device can be worked at all hours of the day and night. When the light portions of the negative appear, these dots follow each other so rapidly that they produce a dash. These impulses of even intensity are picked up and by a reverse process set to work making sketches. The recording device is double—a fountain pen records the sketches; and a photographic device registers the picture anew on a negative. Strangely enough, the pen draws pictures that at the present stage of development give better ideas of the original than the photographic reproduction, although the pen device was added only to give the receiving operator a better idea of how the picture was coming out.
Pictures were sent at the rate of about one every 20 minutes. The first to come was President Coolidge. The next, Secretary Hughes. Next came a Chinese proverb in heavy type: "One picture is worth 10,000 words" (at the present speed of transmission each picture is about the equivalent of 600 words—at 7c. a word, press rate, $42). Pictures of Oxford winning a relay race at Cambridge, of a steamship wreck on the Tweed River, of Queen Mother Alexandra, of Premier Stanley Baldwin, of Owen D. Young, of Ambassador Kellogg, of the Prince of Wales, were also transmitted. The man principally responsible for the new radiograph is Captain Richard H. Ranger, who devised the means of sending uniform impulses so that static does not annul the transmission. General J. G. Harbord, President of the Radio Corporation, philosophized: "As we study the forward marches of science and their effect of steadily shrinking the world to what will ultimately become a single, big community of fellow humans, we must admit the growing necessity for the development of a universal language. Until this new process is worked out in its tedious way and accepted by the nations of the world, photoradiograms, which speak the truly universal language of pictures, will go far to bridge the gap that different latitudes and tongues have interposed between the peoples of this sphere on which we live."