Television

This paper gives an outline of a new television system developed in the laboratories of RCA Victor Company, in Camden, N. J.The system is truly electrical and employs only electronic devices, without a single mechanically moving part.The translation of the visual image is accomplished by means of a vacuum tube called the iconoscope. This tube is a virtual electric eye and consists of a photo-sensitive mosaic corresponding to the retina of the human eye, and a moving electron beam representing the nerve of the eye. The image is projected optically on the mosaic and transformed within the tube into a train of electrical impulses, representing the illumination of individual points of the image.The reproduction of the image is accomplished by means of another vacuum tube, the kinescope, which transforms the electrical impulses back into the variation of light intensity through the bombardment of a fluorescent screen by the moving electron beam.The movement of the electron beams in both tubes, which is responsible for both transformations, is linear and divides the picture into a series of parallel lines. The movements are synchronized so that the instantaneous position of the beams with respect to a point in the picture is always identical. The synchronization is transmitted together with the picture signals, and operation of the receiver is completely automatic.The sensitivity of the iconoscope, at the present time, is approximately equal to that of a photographic film operating at the speed of a motion picture camera, permitting the transmission of outdoor scenes. The resolution is high, much higher than necessary for television images of the highest quality.The paper describes the theory of the system, its characteristics, mode of operation, and includes photographs of images obtained on the fluorescent screen of the receiver.