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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 06.7

Dead Medium: Bell Labs Half-Tone Television

From: house127_AT_teleport.com (Trevor Blake)

Source: RADIO PHYSICS COURSE / An Elementary Text Book on Electricity and Radio by Alfred A. Ghirardi, E. E. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, Eighth Impression June 1937, Radio & Technical Publishing Co. 45 Astor Place, New York City

(((In discussing how an image may be sliced into elements for transmission, the half-tone process used in newspaper photography is explained. Immediately following is this curiosity.)))

"It is evident from this discussion of half-tone reproductions, that in television, it is really not necessary to transmit and reproduce the entire scene as a single unit each 1/20 of a second. We may split up the scene viewed by the television transmitter, into elementary dots, transmit electrical vibrations corresponding to the brightness or darkness of each individual dot, and reproduce the dots in the same relative order and position at the receiving end. Then our received picture will be made up of a number of dots similar to a half-tone, and if the elements are small enough it will be acceptable. This system has actually been used by Dr. Ives at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, but since a separate circuit was necessary for each element or dot (2,500 circuits in all in this particular apparatus), the system was very complicated and commercially impractical."

Trevor Blake

127 House - An Independent Archive of Systematic Ideology

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