the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

1OO
THE STORY OF TELEVISION
Farnsworth secured several reels from a local film exchange
and ran them through to pick out excerpts that were "telegenic."
Through a North Beach motion-picture house one of
the boys got hold of a bootleg film of the long-count episode in
the Dempsey-Tunney fight at Philadelphia. It was used principally
for laboratory demonstration purposes. Another piece
of popular test film was an excerpt from the Mary Pickford-
Douglas Fairbanks picture The Taming of the Shrew, in which
Mary Pickford combed her hair at least a million times for the
benefit of science and the development of television.
This loop of film was especially suitable for test purposes
because of the detail in the picture. In the beginning Miss
Pickford's features and the lovely glowing strands of her hair
were brought through reasonably well defined, but the background,
such as the items of her attire and the frame of the
casement window, were not so readily distinguished. It was
fascinating to see the improvement from day to day, from week
to week, and from month to month by the amount of detail
that could be seen on the screen as this loop was scanned.