The box from japan, p.13
The Box from Japan, page 13
“No, Mr. Braisted,” he said, “I didn’t come here to see the layout. What I specially came over here for was this.” He unwrapped his wooden Japanese box. “My uncle, Roger Halsey, president of this company, tells me that you spent so much time in the Orient, Mr. Braisted, that you read and write Chinese and Japanese. I’m exceedingly anxious to obtain a translation of these three Oriental characters on this shipping box here. And so—”
“And so,” said the other smiling, “you came straight to an Oriental scholar!” He took the box and surveyed it in silence. Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said briefly, “but I didn’t master Japanese. I did master the new shorter Chinese of New China. This is, of course, Japanese, and I can’t figure it out even with my rudimentary knowledge that runs chiefly to electrical terms and numerals. There are none of them present in the trio. Scientific terms, being modern accretions to any language, run one character to a term. But not so with the older characters. The Japanese writing characters, to be sure, came originally from the Chinese characters, which themselves are degenerated pictographs, but you must remember that each Japanese character consists of a group of several Chinese characters lumped together, degenerated and so changed by evolution that the traces connecting it to its original form are lost to all but the Oriental philologist. One character alone—having once been a group of several that in themselves were originally complete pictures—can mean several English words in itself; three, indeed, can mean a whole flock, a regular verbal barrage!” He surveyed it studiedly. “I can strongly affirm too, by the way, that it isn’t a Japanese business company name; the standard modern words ‘Company’ and ‘Corporation’ aren’t among these three characters.” He paused.
“Well,” declared Halsey with a rueful smile, “my tour of exploration is a failure then.” He commenced wrapping the box back in its newspaper once more.
“It all depends,” said the engineer, “on what you came for. Now had you come to see an actual demonstration of radio-television in colors and perspective across 5000 miles of space—from far-off London, in fact—utilizing the very invention in which I see you hold stock, your tour would have been highly successful.”
CHAPTER XI
How It Was Done
Halsey stared at the engineer. He thought the latter was perhaps joking with him. But the other’s face was serious. Halsey spoke.
“Just—what do you mean, Mr. Braisted?” His own tone was more than curious. “I thought tomorrow evening at 8 p.m. was when the demonstration was to be.”
“In a sense, yes,” said the engineer. “An official demonstration, that one is, for the press. But for the time of fifteen minutes today—and fifteen only—” He glanced at a huge clock ticking away on the rear wall of Hall 457. Its face, carrying the words “Associated Marconi Company Correct Time,” and nearly 3 feet in diameter, was white and brightly illuminated by tiny concealed electric bulbs; across the brilliant field of white two long hands of dead black marked the time plainly for an observer at any point in the hall, and even a third long hand of red added its reading to theirs—although it, evidently, was not a moving hand but just a setting hand for some purpose. The two black hands pointed now to 1:10, while the red hand stood at 17 minutes short of the XII mark. “For a quarter of an hour only,” Braisted continued, “at 1:45 sharp, Chicago time, to be exact, we are going to make a final check-up of the Regent Theatre stage layout with respect to our screen here, and that same stage, you know, is a little matter of 5000 long miles away! Specifically, I’m to report back by cable to the Consolidated Projection Corporation engineer at London the distances by which their proscenium opening overlaps, or fails to coincide exactly with ours here. We tested out yesterday, but their engineer, you see, failed to lock several of his settings last night and thinks that the adjustment of one or more may have been moved a trifle or so in the night by a janitor. Anyway, we want to make our first public test tomorrow night be absolutely right in an artistic sense. In a mechanical sense, we know it will be. At 2 o’clock the Nippiginic River beam station in Canada takes on a heavy load of figures from the Paris Bourse clearing house for Canada and United States—yes, overflow business this month only from the Marconi system—and by a special arrangement with them we get the use of the stress-beam free of the heavy fixed starting-up charges. That is, the Paris Bourse pays for its hour of which the largest part of the charge is the fixed starting-up cost on the ether-stress pulsators, but the Nippiginic River station actually starts up today a quarter of an hour ahead of 2, and gives us the benefit of fifteen minutes of time at operating cost only, free of starting costs. See? That’s the reason for the 1:45 hour of today’s test. But at 2 sharp the pulsator is turned directly off of London onto the waiting Paris one, and starts to receive.” He paused. “I’m all alone. Like to sit in?”
“Sit in? I’ll certainly say I would,” Halsey agreed delightedly. “But, old man, I’m a newspaperman. Sportswriter! I haven’t the least idea in the world how all this thing is accomplished. And your talk of ether-stress pulsators, Nippiginic River stations—it makes me a little dizzy. I’m—I’m afraid I won’t be a very intelligent spectator.”
“A little education, then,” reproved Braisted, “oughtn’t to go amiss. Well, it’s only a quarter after one. I’ve nothing to do till the warning bell strikes at seventeen minutes of the next hour—that’s what that red hand is set for. Step over to my desk here, and have a chair.” He motioned to the capacious leather armchair near his own swivel chair under the lighted flat-top desk. “Yes, just set your box down atop of the desk. It won’t be in the way.” He paused. “So you can’t exactly believe that a moving scene can be transferred by radio, eh? In colors? With depth—and all that?”
Halsey deposited his wrapped Japanese box on the desk, and dropped down into the proffered chair; and then, and then only, did Braisted take a seat. “Well,” commented the younger man, “after seeing the blurred little images thrown by neon tubes that are affxed to our radios, I have hopes. But since Uncle has talked of the ion-screen method—and the Zell Process—and the Hextite crystal—and the Consolidated is paying a million dollars, if, only, and when it gets legally correct title—well, I’ve got to believe, I suppose.” He paused. “What—well—what is this ion-screen improvement on the present television?“
Braisted put his fingertips reflectively together.
“The thing you get today, Mr. Halsey, on the little ground glass screen in your radio panel is a thing which cannot, you know, be projected onto a large screen, even as a pinkish flat-toned affair such as it is. That is because, as you know, the image is made as a result of scanning. You may have seen the scanner in the back of your radio panel; yes—the big flat disk with 24 holes in a spiral, arranged—at least on the transmitting end—so that each hole, transmitting a beam of light from behind the scanner, sweeps in a circular path across the televised subject, and as it passes off the field, the next hole, just a notch lower, starts its path across. Yes, and as that path is traced lightning-like, by the moving pencil of light, the living object on which it falls reflects the light against a photo-electric cell battery so as to vary the intensity of an electric current. It is this varying intensity that is brought by radio to your neon tube in back of your tiny ground glass screen, through holes in your scanner identical in size and spiraled position with the transmitting holes, and moving in exact synchronism. It all seems wonderfully mysterious to you, but to me it seems not only elementarily simple—but now very crude in addition. Yet not nearly so crude when I recall, as when I was a younger man of 27 or so—that was 10 years ago—how we had no way of sending a modulation of the carrier wave so that the two scanning disks could be kept ever synchronized. Jupiter, but those were the days when a man’s face would comically split off into two halves and move right off the field, one half going one way and the other half the other, and where you had to regulate the fool scanner by hand. If you kept your image two minutes continuously, you were lucky.”
“I think I understand the general idea back of that scanning,” commented Halsey. “But—but what happens when you throw that pink image on a large screen?”
“Well, for one thing it’s too faint to be effectively thrown on a screen. But the main reason—ever see a newspaper halftone highly magnified?“
“Sure. The vari-sized dots comprising it are far, far apart and you can scarcely make out what the picture is.”
“Well, that’s it. Enlarge that little image found on your two-inch panel, which is fairly delineated, considering the crude conditions under which it is received today—enlarge it hugely, as I say, and the unscanned paths—the paths between the scanning holes—get magnified just the same as the paths! Here—I’ll show you exactly. I’ve prepared a stationary slide to show it in immobility. Look at that screen across the wall. Yes, the sheet—the sheet with the small magic lantern poised in front of it—your uncle provided me with that curio!” Braisted reached over to a panel fixed to the side of his desk, and snapped a button. The ceiling lights of Hall 457 went out, and the magic lantern lighted up. As it did so, a large picture of a girl leaning on a gate was illuminated in black and white and intermediate tones on the screen. Except that it was crossed, over its entire expanse, by concentric blank paths as though it had been erased by a brigade of erasers wheeling in exact military formation. The effect of the picture was hopelessly marred. Braisted turned it off, and the soft ceiling lights came instantly on again.
“Many scanning methods,” he went on, “were invented in those hectic days of early television experimentation. The most curious, but least promising, so I believe, was the bizarre Clarkson and Campbell-Swinton vacuum cameras with their chambers full of sodium vapor, and with their invariable weightless cathode ray beam traveling over the picture to be televised, under the influence of two cross-wise acting magnetic fields. The most promising, as I thought then, was the Jenkins scanning drum. The most optically illogical, as I also thought even then, was the modification of the Nipkow disk, the ‘rotating pie-pan’ foisted on the market in 1932, in which the perforated part of the disk was made on the vertical rim of a sort of horizontally rotating pie pan, a method, which, of course, required far larger scanning holes than necessary because of the degree into which the holes were projected onto the ground glass screen in the shape of greatly contracted ellipses at the left and right peripheries of the field. But in the scanning drum, as well as in the rotating ‘pie pan,’ and in the proper Nipkow disk as now used universally today, there was never any getting away from this halftone effect which itself alone prevented effective enlargement. Various devices,” Braisted continued, “were attempted by which to get away from the unscanned paths: new series of holes, new forms of spirals, interlapping spirals, even intersecting disks operating on the principle of the old Baird optical lever with its three Nipkows—designed originally by Baird primarily for increasing the speed of scanning. But with the production of our new high-tension or molecularly locked steel—the process which came mighty near affecting the battleship ratios of the world, but didn’t!—the tremendous scanning speeds now possible with the Nipkow disk sent the trend of invention veering back to improving or modifying it, and it is the Consolidated Projection Corporation’s patented improvement on that thing which today represents scanning and the scanning disk at its acme. In short, the thing that today scans every infinitesimal bit of area of a picture—is the so-called ‘wandering scanning disk’—a disk so mounted on complicated axial machinery—yes, we have it in that projector over there—mounted so that its axis travels a definite micrometrical distance vertically downward at every revolution. The axis, of course, could never be made to move in a direction other than a displacement like this in which it at least remains parallel to itself, for a disk moving at such enormous speeds as these modern scanners are tremendously gyroscopic—they can be made to slide back and forth with ease—but only in their own plane. At any rate, by the modern scanner, each path in a series of parallel paths, is, on the next revolution, traced just the infinitesimal fraction of a hole-width lower than it was traced in the preceding path; indeed, each hole in the spiral is steadily moved downward by the axial mechanism of the ‘wandering scanner’ to a point where it finally traces the path originally traced by the next following one in the spiral—and then they all move up again, step by step, a step at every revolution.”
“I suppose without the perfect synchronizing methods this ‘wandering scanner’ could never be used?”
Braisted nodded emphatically. “No, never. It is there, too, that with a second variation in the carrier wave, the scanners commence to move downward in synchronism, and start up again, foot and foot at the tape. They never can get out of step.”
“And this—this—well—ion-screen—this seems to be the keynote of this new method. What is it?” asked Halsey.
“I would say that in addition to the ‘wandering scanner,’ so marvelously synchronized, that the ion-screen and the new super-luminous Kryptam gas variator-tube, with its dazzling but absolutely chromatically pure white light, are the real pivots of the new television. Just as the ‘wandering scanner’ is a product of the Consolidated Projection Corporation’s mechanical and precision laboratories, so is the ion-screen a product of their thermionics laboratories—a plate—like the ground glass finder plate in back of a camera in which you see the full picture you expect to take, in its real colors—a compound plate which consists really of two thin transparent plates, almost touching face to face, from one edge of which compound plate a stream of ions, one ion thick, by the way, is flowing by electrical means from heated radioactive substances. This stream flows to the opposite edge—yes, the plate has only 25 hours of life, but it doesn’t cost over $50 to manufacture—doesn’t cost as much as the use of the ether band on which we transmit it today.” Braisted glanced cautiously at the clock at the back of the hall. “This ion stream is an intensifier of every color, shade and hue thrown on it by the lens battery such as is found in an ordinary camera. It intensifies every black and white, every patch of color, some 100,000 times. It makes possible the scanning, with pin-holes so small as 48 to the inch, direct from the back of the trans-illuminated ion-screen itself. Were you to look at the reverse side of such a screen, or finder, in your camera, properly hooked up electrically, of course, you’d see—”
“I’d see the picture of what the camera was aiming at—but upside down.”
Braisted shook his head. “You’d see nothing but the gleam from ten thousand golden gates of ten thousand heavens,” he said. “Man, you’d be half blind for a month. To keep from being thus, you’d have to do any gazing at that ion-screen through goggles of ebonite blocks an inch thick, entirely encased in rubber one-third of an inch thick just to guard against reflections alone.” He reached down into his desk and withdrew just such a peculiar pair of goggles, and Halsey, taking it curiously from the other’s outstretched hand, saw that the lenses were indeed ebonite blocks, completely opaque. “Now put this on—but leave it up on your forehead till I’m ready to tell you to pull it down. Come this way.”
Braisted led the way over to where the simple enough looking camera faced the Punch and Judy show. He turned a switch—the ceiling lights of Hall 457 went out—and a tiny row of footlights in front of the Punch and Judy show lighted up—and, as Braisted pulled back and forth on the knotted rope that hung forth, Punch methodically and regularly whacked Judy over the head, while Judy rocked nonchalantly back and forth.
“Now take a look in the back of that camera,” he directed. “It has just an ordinary ground glass finding plate in it—don’t be afraid of it.” Halsey peered in. He could see, in a little ground glass plate 2½ inches wide by 2 inches deep, fixed in the exact center of a larger opaque plate, Punch, upside down now, of course, thwacking Judy on her plaster-of-Paris cranium, illuminated in the same garish colors as were on the little figures and on the stage’s back drop.
Braisted now withdrew the opaque plate containing the ground glass finder, and slid in another similar opaque plate contained in a frame of equal size, to which, however, were attached two flexible electric wires running clear to the switchboard. This latter framed oblong seemed to hold in its center a thin glass plate, of identical size with the other, but transparent instead of cloudy, with a shiny wire covered with scales imbedded along the bottom edge, and some screened gridlike thing running along the top edge.
“Now draw your ebonite spectacles down over your face—yes—look straight at where you are looking—see that your goggles fit snugly. Here—I’d better help you.” Braisted turned his pupil’s face toward him, evidently examining the goggles minutely for the snugness of their fitting. Then, apparently satisfied, he turned Halsey’s head gently, drew upon some automatic tightening bolt in the cords that held them, and now Halsey, as he felt the rubber edges of the pliable structure which held the ebonite blocks digging deep into his flesh, found himself indeed in a Cerulean blackness, a blackness more deep than anything he had ever experienced. He felt Braisted now gently guiding his head downward a bit, and then poising it erect in about the same position where it had been before.
Again he heard the click of a switch, and Punch and Judy reappeared.
They were just as before, upside down, in colors, and not a whit brighter. Although they were, at that, he noted, more sharply delineated by far.
“Same thing,” he commented. “More—well—sharp, perhaps, but that’s all. I can even see the cracks in the enamel in Punch’s nose.”
“Same thing,” laughed Braisted, “except that every tone and shade and color on those figures and their little stage and drop curtain is 100,000 times brighter than it was when you last looked. By falling on the stream of colorless white ions, even though that stream is transparent, the scene is intensified more times than has ever been known to be achievable by any optical or photometrical method ever tried or proposed. No—don’t touch your goggles. Wait.” Braisted turned off the plate. Everything went dark. Halsey withdrew his head gropingly. But he turned his head carefully first. Then he took off his goggles. Once more he stood in the soft light from the ceiling.
