Far-Off Speakers Seen as
Well as Heard Here in a
Test of Television

New York Times 8apr1927

Herbert Hoover made a speech in Washington yesterday afternoon. An audience in New York heard him and saw him.

More than 200 miles of space intervening between the speaker and his audience was annihilated by the television apparatus developed by the Bell Laboratories of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and demonstrated publicly for the first time yesterday.

The apparatus shot images of Mr. Hoover by wire from Washington to New York at the rate of eighteen a second. These were thrown on a screen as motion pictures, while the loudspeaker reproduced the speech. As each syllable was heard, the motion of the speaker's lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen in the demonstration room of the Bell Telephone Laboratories at 55 Bethune Street.

When the television pictures were thrown on a screen two by three inches, the likeness was excellent. It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that. When the screen was enlarged to two by three feet, the results were not so good.

At times the face of the Secretary could not be clearly distinguished. He looked down, as he read his speech, and held the telephone receiver up, so that it covered

most of the lower part of his countenance. There was too much illumination also in the background of the screen. When he moved his face, his features became clearly distinguishable. Near the close of his talk he turned his head to one side, and in profile his features became clear and full of detail.

On the smaller screen the face and action were reproduced with perfect fidelity.

After Mr. Hoover had spoken, Vice President J. J. Carty of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and others in the demonstration room at Washington took his place and conversed one at a time with men in New York. The speaker on the New York end looked the Washington man in the eye, as he talked to him. On the small screen before him appeared the living face of the man to whom he was talking.

Time as well as space was eliminated. Secretary Hoover's New York hearers and spectators were something like a thousandth part of a second later than the persons at his side in hearing him and in seeing changes of countenance.

The faces and voices were projected from Washington by wire. It was shown a few minutes later, however, that radio does just as well.

In the second part of the program the group in New York saw and heard performances in the Whippany studio of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company by wireless. The first face flashed on the screen from Whippany, N.J., was that of E. L. Nelson, an engineer, who gave a technical description of what was taking place. Mr. Nelson had a good television face. He screened well as he talked.

Next came a vaudeville act by radio from Whippany. A. Dolan, a comedian, first appeared before the audience as a stage Irishman, with side whiskers and a broken pipe, and did a monologue in brogue. Then he made a quick change and came back in blackface with a new line of quips in negro dialect. The loudspeaker part went over very well. It was the first vaudeville act that ever went on the air as a talking picture and in its possibilities it may be compared with the Fred Ott sneeze of more than thirty years ago, the first piece of comedy ever recorded in motion pictures. For the commercial future of television, if it has one, is thought to be largely in public entertainment super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place in the studio.

A coincidence is that "Metropolis," the German film now showing what purports to be the New York of a century or centuries hence, has a make-believe screen in connection with the telephone-a case of a prophecy being fulfilled about as soon as it started.

The demonstration of combined telephone and television, in fact, is one that outruns the imagination of all the wizards of prophecy. It is one of the few things that Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon, Jules Verne and other masters of forecasting failed utterly to anticipate. Even interpreters of the Bible are having trouble in finding a passage which forecast television. H. G. Wells did not rise to it in his earlier crystal-gazing. It is only within the last few years that prophets have been busy in this field. Science has moved ahead so rapidly in this particular line that one of the men, who played a major part in developing the television apparatus shown yesterday, was of the opinion four years ago that research on this subject was hopeless. More than twenty years ago, however, Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, predicted at a gathering in the tower of the Times Building that the day would come when the man at the telephone would be able to see the distant person to whom he was speaking.

The demonstration began yesterday afternoon at 2:15 with General Carty at the television apparatus in Washington.

Mr. Hoover was then called on to take a seat before the light which divides the sitter into 45,000 squares a second. A few seconds later, the voice of Secretary Hoover was heard over the loudspeaker, as his face appeared on the large screen.

The illuminated transparent screen seemed somewhat corrugated. This is due to the fact that the squares which make up the picture are arranged in fifty rows, one on top of the other. In the centre of the screen appeared a white glare, surrounded by darker markings.

As the eye became accustomed to looking at the screen in the darkened room, the larger luminous patch took shape as the forehead of Secretary Hoover. He was leaning forward in such a way that the forehead was taking up too much of the picture, while his mouth and chin were blotted out behind the telephone transmitter. When he moved, however, the picture became clearer.

The face looked up from the manuscript, the lips began to move and the first television-telephone speech started as follows:

"It is a matter of just pride to have a part in this historic occasion.

"We have long been familiar with the electrical transmission of sound. Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight, for the first time in the world's history.

"Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown. What its uses may finally be no one can tell, any more than man could foresee in past years the modern developments of the telegraph or the telephone. All we can say today is that there has been created a marvelous agency for whatever use the future may find, with the full realization that every great and fundamental discovery of the past has been followed by use far beyond the vision of its creator.

"Every school child is aware of the dramatic beginnings of the telegraph, the telephone and the radio, and this evolution in electrical communications has perhaps an importance as vital as any of these.

"This invention again emphasizes a new era in approach to important scientific discovery, of which we have already within the last two months seen another great exhibit-the transatlantic telephone. It is the result of organized, planned and definitely directed scientific research, magnificently coordinated in a cumulative group of highly skilled scientists, loyally supported by a great corporation, devoted to the advancement of the art. The intricate processes of this invention could never have been developed under any conditions of isolated individual effort."

The process by which yesterday's results were achieved appears infinitely complicated and difficult on first encounter, but becomes fairly simple when traced step by step.

The thing that chiefly staggers the mind is that all that traveled over the wire from Washington to New York or over the ether from Whippany to New York is a series of electrical impulses.

Speed and exactitude are the tremendous achievements in the process. Dots of light are put together at the rate of 45,000 a second to form the motion pictures. Each dot has to be in its exact place. The mosaic of squares would be a jumble -- the picture would be completely "pied" -- if there was an error of one ninety-thousandth part of a second in the synchronization between the sending apparatus in Washington and the receiving apparatus in New York.