Old And New Communication Methods Combined

Old and new methods of communication were combined recently when a Cincinnati radio station used carrier pigeons to speed pictures of a baseball game between Cincinnati Rends and Pittsburgh Pirates to its studio for immediate transmission.

This is the earliest reference I’ve seen to a CCD in a consumer product.

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Amazing New Picturephone
A step closer to in-person

By W. Stevenson Bacon

There’s a brand-new Picturephone in the works that will one day give you instant total communication with anyone you call. What makes it fascinating is the amazing versatility of the delicately engineered unit that holds both picture and camera tubes.

Unlike the old Picturephone, this one gives you a choice of wide-angle picture, long-range shot, or electronic close-up. Pull a lens out and aim it downward, and you can send pictures, drawings, or printed documents. If you wish, you can push a button to see what you’re sending. And if a call catches you in the shower you can simply switch over to three-bar test pattern.

Bell Telephone Laboratories packed all this into an 8-by-11-by-14-inch box by using tiny integrated circuits that incorporate hundreds of transistors and other components on small chips of silicon. In fact, the only vacuum tubes used are the picture and camera tubes. And even the camera tube makes use of semiconductors.

The camera tube is a revolutionary new type that uses a target (the part of the tube that converts incoming light to electrical charges) made of silicon and containing 300,000 light-sensitive diodes formed on it by integrated circuit techniques. It’s the first time that semiconductors and vacuum tubes have been combined to make one device.
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Dictating Machines to Use Magnetic Tape

With the development of the steel tape method of sound recording, present day dictaphones may soon become obsolete. In demonstrations at the Century of Progress sound was stored in the magnetic ribbon for only a few seconds, but engineers believe it possible to construct a simplified dictating machine set along similar lines.

With the use of large rolls of the steel tape, there would be no need to change records as frequently as in the present apparatus. Court proceedings could be stored indefinitely.

This is a hardware packet switched network, kinda like IP circa 1951.

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Dial Switches Message Tubes
By Dialing a number, workers in a Connecticut factory can send written messages and even metal samples to various parts of the plant in about a minute’s time. They are using the familiar old pneumatic tube, the hissing clanging gadget used to make change in many department stores.

This pneumatic tube is different. Wehere older systems required separate tubes to each station, this one has an automatic dial exchange, just like a modern telephone central office, making a few tubes do the work of many. Each carrier has numbers that can be set to guide it automatically to any one of the nine stations that make up the first American installation at the Housatonic plant of the Bridgeport Brass Co. Eventually there will be 20 stations.

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Living Shadow Dances on Giant Electric Sign

PIROUETTING in front of a bank of photo-electric cells, Dixie Dunbar, New York dancer, recently cast a living silhouette on the world’s largest animated electric sign above the Great White Way. Her shadow, thrown on the electric eyes, blacked out lights in corresponding areas of the sign. In regular operation, animated-cartoon silhouettes are projected on the cells from a movie film.

Low-cost viewer lets you see who’s calling

This phone-viewing system gives you a picture of any caller similarly equipped. It can be used on ordinary telephone lines. Push a button and within five seconds the picture appears. Developed by Toshiba Co., Japan, price is estimated at $250 although it’s not yet ready for sale.

Transistor Pocket Radio
THERE ARE NO vacuum tubes employed in this transistor pocket radio recently introduced by Regency of Indianapolis, Ind. It is claimed to be several years ahead of the time set by many stereatronics experts for the development of such a unit for consumer use.
This model, TR-l, is priced at $49.95 and comes in four colors: Black, bone white, cloud white and mandarin red. It measures 3 by 5 by 1.25 inches and weighs less than 12 ounces. Its size is, of course, made possible by the use of tiny high-performance transistors. A miniature 22.5-volt battery supplies the power for the radio.
Photos A and B illustrate the diminutive size of this ultra compact pocket set. The transistor used is known as a grown junction n-p-n type and only four are used in the entire set. This circuit, Fig. 1, uses one transistor as a combination mixer-oscillator, two as intermediate-frequency amplifiers and one as an audio amplifier. A germanium diode is used as a detector.
One of the features of this truly pocket radio is the advantage of long battery life as the power consumption is only a fraction of that required for a comparable vacuum tube unit. This results in a considerable saving in weight and battery-replacement cost. Service problems of tube replacement are eliminated; transistors operate in a different manner from vacuum tubes. The hot filament or cathode in a vacuum tube is continually being consumed as it is operated. No similar life-shortening action takes place in transistors.

The young lady in the photo (left) uses the lightweight walkie-talkie to call orders into the kitchen at Schilling’s Drive-in Restaurant near Covington, Ky. The woman in the car thus gets her food faster. It’s part of an electronic setup developed by Frank Lindley of Cincinnati. An operator at a reciever takes down orders fromt he walkie-talkie carhops. Then, when the food and check are ready, the carhops are alerted by different-colored lights on signal boxes located so that they can be seen from anywhere in the parking lot.

“Hold on ma, let me go light the radio!”

Made in Moscow for use in rural areas, this all-wave radio is reportedly powered by the kerosene lamp hanging above it. A group of thermocouples is heated internally to 570 degrees by the flame. Fins cool the outside to about 90 degrees. The temperature differential generates enough current to operate the low-drain reciever. Regular listeners may want fur lined union suits, though: it works best in a room with open windows.