Science: Coaxial Cable

Television has had one of the oddest histories of any human enterprise. An established technological fact, mainly accomplished by U. S. research, it refuses in the U. S. to emerge from the laboratory. With either the Zworykin iconoscope (RCA-Victor) or the Farnsworth cold-cathode dissector tube “high-definition” images equal in clarity to home cinema and 6 by 8 inches in size can be transmitted. Blond, young Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who rose from obscurity with the help of San Francisco bankers, has leased his system to England and Germany where broadcasting is in government hands. Currently television is regularly broadcast from Berlin.

One television trouble in the U. S., where radio is in corporate hands, is the problem of distance. For clear reception ultrashort waves (one to nine metres) are required, and these have ranges of only 25 to 50 miles, depending on the height of the broadcasting tower. To blanket the whole country would require a network of stations estimated to cost between $80,000,000 and $150,000,000.

A bright promise of solving the distance problem, however, appeared when American Telephone & Telegraph Co.’s experimental laboratories produced the coaxial cable. This consists essentially of two hollow copper tubes with a slender copper wire running through the centre of each, the whole insulated and sheathed in a lead case. Developed primarily as a telephone improvement (it transmits 240 messages simultaneously), it can also handle a frequency band 1,000,000 cycles wide, is able thus to transmit the fluctuating lights & shadows of television. With this cable it would be possible to “pipe” a televised program all over the U. S. A. T. & T. patented its cable, applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to install an experimental line between Manhattan and Philadelphia. Cinema executives objected, professing to see the fertile seed of a ruinous monopoly. The Commission decided that A. T. & T. might install the cable if it were made available to any competitor who might like to putter with it. The company hesitated, unwilling to dispense the fruit of its own labors. Last week A. T. & T. announced that no experimental line would be installed and that all experiments with the cable would be dropped, complacently implied that wide-scale television was now pushed back years-indeed, indefinitely unless the Commission should change its ruling. The least pessimistic observer could not but agree that U. S. television remains around several very sharp corners.