Photos by Radio

Edouard Belin, French inventor, who --like engineers of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (TIME, June 2) -has devised a machine for sending photographs by telephone, last week reported success in transmitting photographs by wireless. A picture sent from his wireless station at Malmaison, ten miles outside of Paris, was published in Le Matin. Convinced of the practicability of transmitting radio pictures between New York and Paris, he intends to establish receiving posts in New York in September.

M. Belin made his tests in the presence of a group of scientists and engineers. The pictures were said to show details clearly, despite the handicaps of stormy weather, occasioning atmospheric interferences, and of the proximity of high power electric engines. Transmission of each photograph took five minutes. The New York Tel. & Tel. inventors have also conducted successful experiments in wireless photography. Their telephone device is applicable to the transmission of pictures by radio whenever atmospheric conditions are such that steadiness of transmission and freedom from interference can be assured. This, they declare, has been fully demonstrated. The Belin machine, however, differs from the Tel. & Tel. machine. The original record from which Belin transmits his pictures must be etched upon a brass cylinder. The Telephone Company's process sends from ordinary photographic films and produces a similar film at the receiving end. A comparison of the merits of the French and American methods is impossible, since neither has yet had extensive public use.

C. Francis Jenkins, of Washington, D. C, has succeeded in transmitting photographs from Washington to Philadelphia by radio and has sent wireless motion pictures from one room to the next. His achievement has the honor of priority, since he was sending both radio and wire pictures two years ago. His apparatus employs optical means, impressing the photographs point by point upon a light-sensitive cell. This cell changes the light and shade variations into telephone or radio current waves. His device differs from the Belin and from the Telephone Company machines.