The Genius at CBS

By one definition, an inventor is someone who converts fancies into facts. A man who turns fancies into facts and then facts into entire industries is much more. He may even be deserving of that overworked word: genius. The description seems to fit Peter Goldmark, 62, president and head of research for CBS Labs. Goldmark built the world's first practical color TV system in 1940 and invented the long-playing record in 1948. His latest discovery may well touch off an even greater electronic convulsion. In Manhattan last week, he displayed the first operating model of Electronic Video Recording (EVR), a new system that transforms an ordinary TV set into a movie screen on which a viewer can play a series of films at any time he wishes as easily as he could play a phonograph record.

The EVR prototype comes 15 months after CBS announced Goldmark's plans for a revolutionary "educational art form" that could turn every TV set into a teaching machine. Though an EVR owner will not be able to record his own programs, he will be able to order pre-made films on almost any topic. In theory, a family equipped with EVR will become a self-contained educational center: Junior will study the sex life of grasshoppers (the subject Goldmark drolly demonstrated last week), Father will settle back for an evening of golf lessons or an audio-visual version of LIFE and Mother will sharpen her French through an EVR correspondence course. CBS has already drawn up a manufacturing agreement with Motorola, Inc., under which Motorola will turn out EVR for institutions in less than two years and for the public market by late 1971.

Freezing Frames. The effect of Goldmark's system is to free individual TV receivers from the confinement of commercial broadcasting. Under its agreement with CBS, Motorola will produce briefcase-sized player units with wires that clamp onto the antenna terminals of existing TV sets. The viewer can then choose a film cartridge, drop it into the player, and dial an unused channel. The film, which automatically threads and rewinds itself, can carry nearly an hour of black-and-white viewing and can be stopped at any time for either individual "freezes" or to flip the frames through one by one as in a slide projector.

The heart of EVR is a tightly wound film, 8.75 mm. wide, that can store an astounding 180,000 separate frames on one seven-inch roll. Previously, no one had been able to compress so much film and still preserve its ability to produce clear playbacks. While working on a CBS lunar-photography project for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goldmark devised a high-resolution film that can carry millions of bits of electronic information. That film has led to an even more startling breakthrough. Goldmark and his colleagues have managed to treat black-and-white film with electronic color codes so that it will reproduce full-color images. When the coded film passes through a special scanner, the colors are electronically retrieved for viewing on the TV screen. The discovery of this cheap color film is likely to stir a revolution in the motion-picture industry and may someday give every amateur the resources of color-movie photography at drugstore prices.

Captivating Experiences. Goldmark believes that initially EVR will be purely instructional--used in schools, hospitals and industries--if only for reasons of cost. Motorola will price the first EVR player units at nearly $800 apiece. Yet mass production could conceivably push the price down to a fraction of that and eventually lead to TV sets with built-in EVR units. "EVR will make education as compelling as TV entertainment," Goldmark insists. He points out that with EVR, a backwoods teacher could become an educational paragon, ordering lectures by Robert Lowell on poetry, by Zino Francescatti on the violin, by the President of the U.S. on politics.

Born in Hungary, and possessed of a rich musical heritage (he enjoys playing his cello to his mother's violin accompaniment), the grey-haired Goldmark hardly seems the Edison-style scientific adventurer. But after studying physics at the University of Vienna, he became so captivated by television that he turned to electronics and moved to the U.S. in 1933 to apply for a job with RCA. He was blithely unaware of the Depression--until he was abruptly turned down. He finally joined CBS in the early days of broadcast TV. "We did everything--put on the show, ran transmitters, jumped in front of the cameras," he says. "We had no audience--there were only a handful of TV sets in the country--but we had to keep on the air to hold our license." Goldmark still maintains a workshop in his Stamford, Conn., home, in which he repairs his own TV sets and tinkers with his latest experiments.

Most Horrible Sound. At CBS, Goldmark's bursts of innovation keep management watchful. His first color-TV system, far simpler than today's color models, was rejected because it would have required the junking of all black-and-white broadcasting equipment then in existence. Though engineers had been working on long-playing records for years, Goldmark did not try his hand at it until he listened to a recorded Vladimir Horowitz concert and despaired at the periodic clunks of rejecting 78-r.p.m. records--"the most horrible sound man ever made." In 2 1/2 years, he had compressed the playing time for six 78-r.p.m. records into the first 33 1/3 microgroove disk and started a multimillion-dollar industry.

Goldmark's EVR may send similar shock waves through CBS. EVR families could, presumably, not bother to tune in the network at all and instead rely on their own library of TV tapes. CBS President Frank Stanton answers that EVR is an "additive" that will complement TV, just as record players complemented radio. Still, CBS has protected its profits with an intricate tangle of patents. An agreement made with the New York Times for creation of the first EVR educational films, for example, provides that CBS will share with the Times in both production and profits. Eventually, as one industry cynic observed last week, the mediocrity of network TV may prove to be a virtue by stimulating the sales of EVR.

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