Mindsweeper

In Los Angeles last week, a 28-year-old inventor named James Tanner announced that he has developed a new electronic system for surveying TV audiences that may make all existing ratings systems obsolete.

Tanner calls the heart of his device a comparator. It works with a sensitive receiver that pulls in a signal from a TV home receiver and compares it with all signals being broadcast by TV stations. The device fits into a panel truck that is driven around city streets, sweeping up signals from all TV sets in the area and calculating what channels they are tuned to. Tanner makes the ambitious claim that it can read a whole apartment building as easily as a private house. The truck moves along at 15 m.p.h. while the machine counts 106 sets a minute. In half an hour, 50 trucks could read 159,000 sets.

Frank Champion, an ABC West Coast transmission engineer, declares that Tanner's system is "foolproof." He says: "I haven't felt so strongly about anything since video tape."

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