Telegravure

In his Connecticut farmhouse, Inventor Arthur S. Ford, a comfortably built man with a generous mustache, played with a paintbrush and window screen. Filling up the wire squares with paint, plotting the outlines of trees, barn and sheep, he made a picture.... From this pastoral beginning he has evolved "telegravure," an invention hailed last week by Editor & Publisher (journalistic trade weekly) as "amazing." By its virtue, newspaper pictures can be transmitted in a simple code of numbers and letters and composed like any other text on a linotype. Telegravure is far simpler than telephotography. Telephotography requires costly apparatus to transform pictures into electric impulses, then back to pictures. The transmitted photograph must be engraved. The Ford process starts with a special photographic plate which "screens" the original picture with a mesh of fine crossed lines. The varying tones of black, grey and white--there are about 26 tones in the standard half-tone print--are thus laid out in a pattern like a cross-stitch sampler. To each tone a letter is assigned--D for deep black, A for very light grey, etc. On the telegravure typewriters and linotype machines are corresponding characters--big D dots, tiny A dots, etc. A series of code phrases describes a picture line by line horizontally. For example, a line across the forehead in a portrait of George Washington might read "D7B3A6B4C2D8." A fast typer can compose a 3 x 2 in telegraving in ten minutes. The picture is "retouched" by reading its proof, correcting typographical errors. The finished block of type-dots is ready to print without further processing. ... Journalists on their way to newspaperdom's annual gathering in Manhattan looked forward last week to the first telegravure demonstrations.