Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1950-1954)

is made in this way: The drone, armed with a powerful warhead, and equipped with television transmitting equipment and electronic control equipment, is catapulted from the carrier and guided to a predetermined altitude. Here an airborne guide plane takes over control of the drone and directs it to the target area. At the time the drone is ready to make its pay-off dive, the guide plane is miles away, out of antiaircraft range. Television signals from the drone enable it to be guided on to the target. All during its flight, from the deck of the carrier to the target, the progress of the drone is recorded in a specially equipped electronics room aboard the ship. High-Speed Still and Motion-Picture Photography Since the last Progress Committee Report an exceptionally widespread effort has been made on a world-wide basis in the realm of photographic instrumentation. It is beyond the scope of these paragraphs to set forth this progress in detail. For more detailed analysis, the reader is referred to "Progress in Photographic Instrumentation in 1 950,"38 and subsequent annual reports to be published in this Society's Journal. The following analysis therefore is limited essentially to the Society's effort in the field of high-speed still and motionpicture photography and attendant ramifications. Considerable work has been reported in the world's scientific literature on both sides of the Atlantic. The use of highspeed photographic techniques is expanding rapidly as a greater awareness of application is becoming more evident. The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain during 1952 held a number of meetings the results of which were published in the Photographic Journal, Vol. 92B, Sept.-Oct. 1952. In addition, the Royal Photographic Society held a most interesting symposium at Cambridge University on October 4, 1952, with a number of papers specifically relating to high-speed still and motion-picture photography. Also in October of this year, the First International Symposium on High-Speed Photography was held by this Society in Washington, D.C. Forty-three papers were presented at these sessions which included participation by leading scientists from England, France, Germany, Canada and Sweden. This was a most successful meeting and the papers resulting will be published in these pages. The Society is to be congratulated for its part in fostering this program and for due recognition of the outstanding work of the Chairman of this Symposium, Mr. John H. Waddell. A number of papers on high-speed still and motion-picture photography were presented at the Chicago Convention of the Society in April 1952 and have subsequently been published. High-Speed Camera and Component Design. In order to provide for the study of phenomena which take place in very short time intervals, Dr. J. W. Beams39 and his colleagues at the University of Virginia have developed, over a number of years, a high-constant-speed rotating mirror system. The mirror is magnetically suspended in a high vacuum and is imparted a rotation through the medium of a rotating magnetic field. The circuitry for operation of the mirror and for rotational speed measurement is given in the paper. Speeds of the order of 20,000 rps have been achieved with this system. Design considerations for rotating prism-type high-speed motion-picture cameras were further discussed by Kudar,40 reiterating, in the main, his previous thesis on this subject. The Merlin-Gerin-Debuit Cameras made in Grenoble, France, were described by Gunzbourg.41 These two cameras use essentially the same optical principle of multiple rotating objectives. The first, a 16mm 3000-frames/sec camera has 80 matched lenses and the other, a 100,000-frames/sec camera uses 548 May 1953 Journal of the SMPTE Vol. 60