Talking pictures : how they are made, how to appreciate them (c. 1937)

Talking Pictures page of this book first by telegraph and then by television. To do this by telegraph each letter is methodically spelled out and if there are twenty-five hundred letters on each page it would require about twenty-five minutes per page. Now if it were possible to have a mechanical eye and brain capable of reading the entire page in a small fraction of a second, and transforming it into electrical impulses like rapid telegraph dots, we could send the contents of this page perhaps thirty times each second. If these successive transmissions of the contents of the page could now be received, not by the ear of the receiving person, which is sensitive only to relatively few impulses per second, but by his eye, which is capable of perceiving the very large number of impulses each second of which visible light waves are composed, he might be able to understand what was sent over the telegraph just as well and perhaps more easily than if he were listening to the telegraph dots. For now he would be "seeing" the page not as a group of separate dots, but as though it were a half-tone photograph like those in newspapers. The eye blends the dots of which the image is composed together, and if there are a great many dots in the image the detail is fine and clear. It is to secure fine detail that the television image must be broken up into as many tiny dots as possible. Of course this image would only last for one thirtieth of a second and it would make a very poor impression on the brain. If these images were to follow one another each one thirtieth of a second, the eye would see an apparently continuous picture of the page as though it [280]