Visual Broadcasting

Seven U. S. radio stations last week were broadcasting pictures. Two were operating regularly, four irregularly. The last were testing out their frequencies. The stations: WGY, Schenectady, N. Y. (General Electric); KDKA, East Pittsburgh, Pa. (Westinghouse); WRNY, New York (Experimenter Publishing Co.); 3XK, Washington (Jenkins Laboratories); 2XAL, New York (Experimenter Publishing Co.) ; 1XAY, Lexington, Mass. (Donald R. Lafflin); 4XA, Memphis, Tenn. (Wrec., Inc.); 9XAA, Chicago (Chicago Federation of Labor).

These stations, one or another, are sending out still photographs, moving pictures. They are reproducing scenes enacted directly before their broadcasting machines, in grey silhouet and in complete shade tones.

Special home receiving sets are now so numerous (between two and three thousand) and this visual experimenting so important that last week O. H. Caldwell, of the Federal Radio Commission, urged his associates to encourage it by all possible regulations.

In Manhattan Dr. Herbert E. Ives and Dr. Frank Gray of the Bell Telephone Laboratories operated a machine which directly broadcasts vast outdoor scenes a fair distance from their lens. Heretofore only small studio scenes could be transmitted.

The wide interest in visual broadcasting has already warranted the publishing of a special magazine, Television, by Hugo Gernsback, famed producer of "bug" magazines.