The Unsleeping Eye

In the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's freight yards near Chicago last week, a yard clerk walked over to an incoming train for the routine job of writing down the serial number of each freight car. When he turned in the numbers to the assistant superintendent, he was told: "I know them already. I watched the cars come in on television."

This new use of TV was an experiment which the Radio Corp. of America hopes may soon revolutionize the yard techniques of U.S. railroads. Beside B. & O.'s main incoming track, RCA had set up a Vidicon camera, a new type of TV camera which RCA put on sale last week. The camera picked up the boxcar numbers, flashed them on a screen in the yard's four-story control tower. Another camera, set between the tracks (with floodlights) and aimed upward, inspected the passing cars for cracked truck frames, broken springs, missing journal-box lids, etc. Though the equipment will continue to be tested for operation in snow and sleet conditions B. & O. already pronounced it "ideal for watching yard operations--especially blind spots and ends of yards distant from the yardmaster's office." The biggest appeal for RCA's new closed-circuit TV unit was its price: $5,500, only one-third or less of the cost formerly required to set up a circuit of equal fidelity. As a result, RCA hoped to turn the promising new field of industrial TV into a big business.

Industrial TV was pioneered by Ohio's small Diamond Power Specialty Corp. But now not only RCA but CBS, Du Mont, Remington Rand and other big companies are in it, and the industrial uses of TV are fast increasing. Samples:

P: Boston's Jordan Marsh department store uses the CBS-Remington $25,000 color circuit, Vericolor, to lure shoppers to different floors by posting screens at strategic points to show fashions, home furnishings, etc.

P: Utilities use Diamond Power's cheap ($4,200) Utiliscope. For Long Island Lighting Co., it peers inside a furnace to make sure the pilot light is burning before the furnace is refueled. For Manhattan's Consolidated Edison, it watches the water level in a boiler five floors away and checks up on fly-ash at the top of 250-ft. chimneys for the furnace tenders.

P: U.S. Steel's Geneva (Utah) plant, using four Utiliscopes, is able to watch three furnaces with one man, speed up the reheating of slabs.

P: North American Aviation uses Remington's $9,500 black & white Vericon for close observation of rocket engines on test stands, a job too dangerous for men.

P: The New Haven Railroad is planning to install Du Mont cameras at 14 stations along its tracks to watch for hotboxes, thus replace 14 workmen.

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