Up Next on TV: The Hoovers

The marriage of sight and sound. In the 1920s, people wanted their movies to have sound. They wanted their radio to have pictures.

Experiments involving television had been going on in various parts of the world as far back as the 19th century. In 1927, they were going on in Whippany, New Jersey. A year earlier, the Bell Telephone labs set up an experimental radio station there to be able to run tests without city folks being inconvenienced.

The company’s engineers decided they were ready and on April 7, 1927, a large group of politicians, newspaper reporters and radio people were gathered together at the Bell Labs building at 55 Bethune Avenue in New York.

The United Press of that date reveals:

There was a hush in the laboratory auditorium as Herbert P. Ives, of the Bell Telephone technical staff, announced the first step in the demonstration, the application of television from one end of the room to the other. Observers were asked to file through a curtained booth and look into a small box where they would see a reflection of a man sitting behind a screen at the other end of the auditorium.
Here, if any skeptics remain in this age of science, all doubt was dispelled. The image in the box was perfect. Technicians explained that the image was not being brought directly across the room but through hundreds of yards of wires strung down from the lower floors of the big laboratory building.
In the demonstration with Washington both the telephone and the radiophone were used in the transmission of the image to New York. Telephone wires carried the light waves to a station in New Jersey from where they were radioed to New York.

The scene switched to a brick building at 1208 H Street Northwest in Washington, D.C. at 2:15 p.m. A.T. and T. vice president J.J. Carty appeared on the screen and spoke to company president Walter S. Gifford in New York. Then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was called on to be televised. The Associated Press filed several different reports. Here’s one of them on the Washington broadcast.

SEE BY TELEPHONE
Scientists’ Dream Of Television Becomes Reality As Sight Is Transmitted By Wire
NEW YORK, April 7. (AP)—Television, a scientists' dream ever since the telephone was invented half a century ago, became an actuality today when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover spoke over the telephone in Washington and was seen as well as heard in the Bell Telephone laboratories here.
Not only were Secretary Hoover and a score of others in Washington seen in New York by telephone wire, but a radio program was broadcast over the laboratories' experimental station 3XN, at Whippany, N. J., and moving likenesses of the performers as well as the sound of their voices were put on the air and transmitted to a screen in this city.
Officials of the American Telephone and Telegraph company announced that today's demonstration marked the results of years of research and experimentation and that study would be continued with the purpose of improving television to a higher state of efficiency.
They acknowledged that at present the seeming miracle of seeing by wire and wave length was not at a stage where it could be put to such general use as the telephone. The necessary equipment precludes that possibility for some time to come, they said, but the feat of television itself has been accomplished and indications are that "it is likely to have a real place in the world's work of distant communication."

The images of today's speakers in Washington and Whippany were thrown onto both small and large screens. On the screen designed for the telephoner's use solely, the pictures were exceedingly clear, easily recognizable as likenesses of the person at the other end of communication. On the large screen, about one and one half by three feet, the results were not so clear.
Especially was this noticeable when Secretary Hoover’s image was transferred from the small screen, on which is showed clearly while he talked with President Walter S. Gifford, of the telephone company, to the large screen for the benefit of the half a hundred newspapermen and scientists present at the demonstration.
At times during Hoover’s address the likeness on the larger screen was recognizable, but at others it was so faded and rippled, as though water was running over it, that it became nothing but a formless shadow.
Again, at changing moments, only a pair of eyebrows, or an ear, or a mouth, would be visible as the secretary’s voice boomed from the loud speaker.
After Secretary Hoover had addressed the gathering in New York, business associates in the two cities exchanged greetings and those on the New York end viewed the man they were in communication with on the smaller screen.
The first exchange, after the official greetings, passed between Frank B. Noyes, president of The Associated Press, in Washington, and Carl S. Brandebury of the New York office of The Associated Press. The likeness of Mr. Noyes was so clear in New York that the scintillation of light on his spectacles as he moved his head in speaking could be seen plainly.
Although the mechanism of television is naturally immensely technical in detail, its basic principles may be compared to those of the telephone. As in the telephone, instruments are used which are electrically sensitive to sound, so now instruments have been devised sensitive in a like way.
The subject, as he telephones, is "placidly scanned" by three great "photo-electric eyes," the largest photo-electric cells ever built. The impressions made on these cells are translated into varying intensities of electric current and as such are carried, over wire, or wave lengths. At the receiving end machines have been invented which can turn the varying current back into light and shade and so reproduce the image of the scene scanned by the electric "eyes."
More than fifteen complete images of the scene are sent over wires or air every second, so that the motion of the subject has no more of jerkiness than a moving picture. The company announced that there is no one inventor of television, many scientists at the laboratories having co-operated in its development, but three men were mentioned as having contributed most of the research which lead to the present stage. The three are Herbert E. Ives, son of Frederick E. Ives, inventor of the half-tone process of reproduction; Frank Gray and H. M. Stoller.

What did Hoover have to say about his experience? Here’s the Associated Press again in a sidebar story.

HOOVER LAUDS TEST
WASHINGTON, April 7. (AP)—Hope that the electrical transmission of sight, publicly demonstrated today for the first time in history, would have an importance as vital as the beginning of the telephone, telegraph and radio, was expressed today by Secretary Hoover.
This was a part of the message the Commerce Secretary sent over the telephone wires from Washington to New York, while instruments operating at the two ends of the line enabled his audience at the American Telephone & Telegraph Company studio in the metropolis to see him as he spoke.
Secretary Hoover sat in the telephone company’s studio hero before a large cabinet and spoke into an extension telephone. Rays of light played across his features constantly while he read slowly from his manuscript. Before and after he spoke he listened in on an extension telephone to conversations between guests here and in New York.
The Secretary’s Address
“It is a matter of very great pride to have a part in this historic occasion” the Secretary said to his New York audience. “We are all of us familiar enough with the electrical transmission of sound. Today we have the very startling sense of the transmission of sight, for the first time in the world’s history. It may be that after awhile we can make little speeches like this and stay on the job here.
“I am impressed with the exhibition of human genius which has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect and in a manner hither to unknown. What its uses may finally be, no one can tell, any more than man could foresee in past years the modern development of the telegraph or the telephone.
Great Future in Store
“All we can say today is that there has been created a marvelous agency for whatever use the future may find, with the full realization that every great and fundamental discovery of the past has been followed by use far beyond the vision of its creator.
“Every school child is aware of the dramatic beginnings of the telephone, the telegraph and the radio and I hope this evolution in electrical communications has perhaps an importance as vital as any of these.
“I always find in these occasions a great stimulation to confidence in the future itself. If we can be assured a flow of new and revolutionary inventions to maintain thought, stimulate spirit, and provide a thousand new opportunities for effort and service, we will preserve a vital and moving community.
“Scientists for many years and in many countries have struggled to solve the problems of television. We may all take pride in the fact that its actual accomplishment is brought about by American genius and its first demonstration is staged in our own country.”

That was only part of the demonstration. The New York Herald Tribune of April 8 mentioned the appearances of Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Elsie May Grosvenor, wife of the president of the National Geographic Society and a daughter of Alexander Graham Bell.

Then came the TV show from 3XN. Here’s how the New York Times described it in its page-one story of April 8:

In the second part of the program the group in New York saw and heard performances in the Whippany studio of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company by wireless. The first face flashed on the screen from Whippany, N. J., was that of E. L. Nelson, an engineer, who gave a technical description of what was taking place. Mr. Nelson had a good television face. He screened well as he talked. Next came a vaudeville act by radio from Whippany. A. Dolan, a comedian, first appeared before the audience as a stage Irishman, with side whiskers and a broken pipe, and did a monologue in brogue. Then he made a quick change and came back in blackface with a new line of quips in negro dialect. The loudspeaker part went over very well. It was the first vaudeville act that ever went on the air as a talking picture and in its possibilities it may be compared with the Fred Ott sneeze of more than thirty years ago, the first piece of comedy ever recorded in motion pictures. For the commercial future of television, if it has one, is thought to be largely in public entertainment—super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place at the studio.
The next number from the studio at Whippany was a regular radio program piece—a short humorous dialect talk by Mrs. H. A. Frederick of Mountain Lakes.
Before and between the acts the announcer of the Whippany studio made a motion picture appearance. He was seen as well as heard.
Phone Girl Is Seen, Too.
In the Washington part of the demonstration the telephone girl was visible. She appeared on the miniature screen and asked to whom the caller wished to talk. This one was a good-looking girl with fluffy hair, and as cool and efficient as if she had been at the television-telephone switchboard all her life.
A coincidence is that “Metropolis,” the German film now showing what purports to be the Now York of a century or centuries hence, has a make-believe screen in connection with the telephone—a case of a prophecy being fulfilled about as soon as it started.

Among the editorials on television after the event was one in the Binghamton Press of April 11, 1927. Its prediction:

Though it has still to be perfected, television is distinctly a commercial utility of the near future. What it means, it is difficult for even the most vivid imagination to grasp. Its possibilities seem almost endless.
Any occurrence that can be photographed eventually may be transmitted, and seen as it takes place by persons at any distance. Millions of radio users may see as well as hear a presidential inauguration or world series ball game. Where news reel operators now cover events for the movies, these operators some day may transmit a ship launching, a street riot or a spectacular fire to persons sitting comfortably in their home a thousand miles away.
It ís not impossib1e that in time, the entire country will look in and 1isten in at a session of the Senate or the House in Washington as easily as persons tune in now on a radio concert. Successful dramas may be staged, not for a single theater, but for a million radio users.
This sounds fantastic. Television may not develop in just that way. But in whatever way it does develop, its future will add to the miracles of an age in which science is making the “impossible” appear commonplace.

The next day, the Atlanta Constitution showed its sense of humour with a prediction in a sub-headline. It read “Great American Habit of Jumping From Bathtub To Telephone Likely To Be Abandoned.”

Mrs. Hoover looked ahead, too. No, she didn’t foresee the Oval Office for her husband. Instead, she said on camera “What will you invent next? I hope you won’t invent anything that reads our thoughts.”

Well, Mrs. H., we hate to tell you, but...