Quicker Fox

Before television can turn its corner, it will have to secure from the FCC the wavelengths needed for commercial operation. With current experiments using a 6,000-kilocycle band for each picture transmitter, televisers would require such a hog's share of useful frequencies, that operators of other short-wave services (wireless communications, aeronautical radio, etc.) would fight. All this has the FCCommissioners pondering.

Think is the slogan of International Business Machines Corp., and last week I. B. M. representatives showed the commissioners a gadget which will make them think plenty. I. B. M. Radiotype Division General Manager Walter S. Lemmon rigged on the roof over the commissioner's hearing room a temporary aerial, demonstrated a typewriter on which the keys click in response to radio impulses, picked up a message typewritten through the air from a Georgetown laboratory. Engineer Lemmon told the commission that one television station wavelength assignment would be roomy enough for 1,125 radio-typewriter channels, asked that his company be assigned wavelength space as wide as one television station is for experiment with radio business machines.

Radiotype looks like an ordinary typewriter, can be operated by any typist, can handle invoices, statements, inventories, any size paper, complicated or simple forms. More versatile than teletype, radiotype is also twice as fast, can transmit and type 120 words a minute. Stocky, blond Inventor Lemmon is working with Assistant Engineer Clyde Fitch on attachments to make radiotype do and transmit the work of adding machines, cash registers.

Seven years of experiment have gone into radiotype. Test machines are now typing through the air at racing speed, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." And Division Manager Lemmon expects to have marketable equipment by year's end.

I. B. M.'s Lemmon is no radio newcomer. He was Presidential staff radio officer on the George Washington when it took Woodrow Wilson to the Peace Conference, devised a pioneer ship-to-shore telephone service for that trip, made a fortune from his patent on single-dial radio control and twenty-odd other radio inventions. Also a broadcaster, he is founder president of the World Wide Broadcasting Foundation which owns and operates non-profit shortwave Station WIXAL (Boston), dips into his own pocket to broadcast New England enlight enment to the world.

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