the life of Philo T Farnsworth - Early Television Foundation

TELEVISION NETWORK POSSIBILITIES
York to Philadelphia was large, but there was no proof that the
development expense involved would be repeated when connections
were made with other cities.
Shortly after this first stretch of coaxial line was laid, Bell
Laboratories invited Farnsworth and some of his associates to
the Philadelphia Bourse Building to view a private showing of
the transmission of a television picture from New York to
Philadelphia. Several of the most eminent engineers of Bell
Laboratories were present, among them Dr. Ives, the great experimenter
in television for the Bell System. We were ushered
into a small office where the picture was shown. The transmission
was of a motion picture of a horse race. The received image
was of great clarity
and surprising sharpness considering the
fact that for this test they were using somewhere between 200-
and 300-line
detail. I remember particularly the sheen of the
flanks of the beautiful animal that won the race as he was led
up
for the award.
After the demonstration Farnsworth and members of his
staff held quite an extended technical discussion with the engineers
of the Bell Laboratories. The Bell engineers showed us
a duplicate of the cathode-ray tube upon which the picture had
been received. They told us that this tube had cost the laboratories
$10,000 to construct. It stood fully
five feet high and had
the most astonishing array of apparatus
in the stem. There were
all sorts of mechanisms to keep the vacuum constant, to check
the performance of every element in the tube, and generally,
to make the test transmission foolproof. To one who reads
casually in the newspaper the story of a demonstration of this
sort, there is no realization of the patience and skill that have
gone into the successful accomplishment of the results. In this
case the very expensive tube had been used instead of the ordinary
$25 or $50 cathode-ray television receiving tube because