This article gives a nice overview of the technological challenges that had to be overcome to make HDTV commercially viable. At the time this article was written there wasn’t even a tape drive that could support the bandwidth needed for a digital HDTV stream. Not to mention the hardware needed to encrypt all that digital content in real-time to comply with HDCP.

We did get our HDTV, though not in the 1980’s as the article predicts.

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High-Resolution TV
- here come wide-screen crystal-clear pictures

New video components speed TV systems that match 35-mm-film fidelity

By JOHN FREE

Washington, D.C.

For several days, groups of government officials, politicians, and journalists crowded into a darkened room at CBS’s offices here. We’d come to view a rare, one-time collection of video gear. “What we are going to show you,” CBS’s Joseph Flaherty, vice-president of engineering development, told my group, “is a combination of high-resolution TV, stereo sound, wide-screen TV, and enhanced-color TV.”

During the next hour I watched a variety of amazing TV images that had extraordinary clarity—more than five times the detail of television pictures you see on conventional home receivers. The high-resolution pictures, a dazzling match for sharp-focus 35-mm slides, were shown on special “Cinerama-type” direct-view sets and a large-screen projection TV. Other equipment used by CBS, such as microelectronic encoding circuits and a Sony-built digital video recorder, may have a key role—in improved forms—in delivering this new type of TV to you during the 1980’s.

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Movies Travel to Town in a Trailer Theater

Traveling from town to town throughout the northwest, a trailer theater is bringing talking movies to communities lacking theaters of their own. This mobile movie house is fifty-five feet long and comfortably seats sixty persons in bus-style chairs, which are permanently fixed. A small stage over the front wheels permits vaudeville or lectures, and two projectors in a fireproof booth show up-to-date movies against a rolling screen. If power lines are not handy, the plant can furnish its own 110-volt current. Electric fans have been installed.

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Freak Movies Easy with New Amateur Camera

A NEW sixteen-millimeter movie camera now places the professional’s bag of tricks in the hands of the amateur. Fade-outs, double exposures, animations, and enlarged close-ups are only a few of the unusual shots that can be obtained merely by pressing buttons.

Besides lens turret and slow-motion shutter, this new product of the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, N. Y., has a number of other improvements not found on the ordinary high-grade home movie camera. A crank that runs the film through the camera backwards, an accurate, geared film footage indicator, a unique focusing device, and a shutter that can be opened or closed while the camera is operating are important features.

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MAKING A SMALL ELECTRIC AUTOMOBILE

By E.B. Stack.

THE electric automobile described in this article is not merely a toy, but a real electric car. It was designed and made for children, but will carry a load of four hundred pounds with ease. Every part, while made as light as possible, is strong enough to stand any amount of rough usage. It is ideal for the youngster who is past the coaster-wagon stage, but not yet old enough to be allowed to run the “flivver.”

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THREE FACES ON ONE PORTRAIT

Depending upon the position from which it is viewed, an ingenious slotted sign recently erected in Moscow, Russia, shows the portraits of Karl Marx, the father of socialism, Nikolai Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution, and Joseph Stalin, present head of Soviet Russia. On the face of the magic sign are painted the features of Marx. Attached to the sign at right angles are vertical slots. Each bears a fragment of another portrait on either side. When the sign is viewed from the left, these fragments merge and form the portrait of Stalin. When seen from the right, they produce the picture of Lenin. The figure of Marx is hidden except when sign is viewed from in front.

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Beer Making Is Marvel of Industrial Chemistry

With the removal of national restrictions against the manufacture and sale of beer, American brewers are again in action. Their operations represent one of the most extensive applications of modern industrial chemistry. More than 2,000,000,000 pounds of malt, 650,000,000 pounds of corn and corn products, and 41,000,000 pounds of hops are a part of the vast consignment of raw materials that experts will turn each year into beer. On these pages, our artist shows how the transformation is accomplished in one big, and now active, American brewery.

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