We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
and its simple mechanism cleaned and checked. Then a length of colored blank leader is clipped to the film extending from the camera, and the wet end of the machine is carefully rethreaded with the leader.
“From this point until the printing operation, the operation of the machine can. if required, be made almost completely automatic. Photoelectriccell circuits at the proper points along the track could operate the timer that indicates the speed of the horses, and another ‘electric eye’ could automatically switch on the camera as the lead horse intercepted a light-beam a length or so from the finish. In fact, in some installations we have used this automatic starting control with great success.
“But perhaps the most important single thing about the Photo-Chart system is the fact that it is the only race-finish camera in which it is absolutely impossible for optical distortion of perspective or minute inaccuracies in mounting the camera to distort the picture to favor the nearer horse. Due to the use of the movingfilm-and-slit principle, and to the design of the slit itself, perspective distortion is eliminated. For the same reason, minor inaccuracies in positioning the camera — which would in a conventional camera system make the picture favor either the nearer or the farther horse according to the direction
in which the camera’s optical axis deviated from absolute alignment with the finish-line — have no effect on the accuracy of the Photo-Chart camera. As long as the slit is so positioned that it is virtually an extension of the finish-line, no inaccuracy in the way the lens is pointed (so long as the field still includes the finish) can sway the Photo-Chart picture from its impartial accuracy!”
Clearly, this impartiality, together with the almost perfect elimination of even the chance of a dead heat, is what has persuaded the chiefs of so many leading tracks from coast to coast to install the Photo-Chart at their tracks, and to place, as they and the leading racing form experts do, such reliance in Photo-Chart pictures. But the unceasing miracle to the layman, whether he is a professional or amateur photographer or just Mr. Average Man. is that of watching a
O 7 o
close finish and then — usually before the jockeys have all gotten hack to the line — seeing a picture of that finish handed to the judges to squelch all possible differences of opinion. And once you've seen one of those pictures of a close finish posted, you know no argument is possible. Whether you lost your shirt on an ‘also-ran’ or on a nag whose nose just wasn’t long enough to come in first, you’re convinced !
21