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About The Oregon statesman. (Salem, Or.) 1916-1980 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 2, 1955)
Sfcrttnnan. Salem, Ore Sunday. Jan. 2. 1S55 See. 2) I Pictures 'Caught Up' With News. When Wirephbtps Introduced 20 Years Ago ; (Editor's Nater.The first Associ ated Press Wlrephot tu trans mitted 29 years f. marking the btgiaalaf af a aew era la Journal ism. Here is the story of a sys tem that made the photograph as timely as the headliae) By SAUL PETT V NEW YORK (A Twenty years ago Saturday, The Associated Press was wetjded to a daringly new system of picture transmis , sion Wirephoto. , While the immediate family was optimistic, many relatives grum- - bled that the marriage would never last 1 They are so utterly incdmpati ble, tsk-tsked a quivering aunt ' She'll make him broke within a year, muttered 'an uncle with one ! band on his wallet. But the marriage endured and .prospered- and produced several ' ' hundred v thousand beautiful chil- - clren. Along the way, it changed . the face of journalism. Today, 20 years later, it is commonplacefor pictures to, move by wire as fast as the news they illustrate for both to make the same edition. " Today a camera often is as close i to the news as a reporter's note- ' book, a negative is as breathless as a bulletin. And the history of Wirephoto told in its 20-year fanv fly album is world history itself. . . Dirigible Explosloa r A huge dirigible exploding' In mid-air. Chamberlain, Hitler, Mus " solini and Daladier posing for the .' 'shame of Munich. A half -sunk bat- - tleship smoking at Pearl Harbor. ' The backs of nameless - GIs ; storming Omaha Beach. Marines " raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The slumped shoulders of Babe Rfith ; retiring to die. The monstrous white mushroom billowing up from Bikini. A crumpled Korean bridge sagging under the -weight of flee ing war refugees. Stalin's casket , . borne by some men named Malen ' icov and Beria and Molotov . . , the new the old, the day to day, the epic and the sidelong glance, Wirephoto began Jan. 1, 1935, " with 40 subscribers in 25 cities. . Today its network stretches over 23.000 miles of wire, to more than 500 newspapers and television sta tions in the United States and Canada. Its success is the success of men and machines. Fighting Off Mob It is photographer Warren Win 'e, terbottom fitting off a pro-segregation mob in Delaware. It is the 'r'. four AP cameramen who won Pulitzer prizes. It is the staff pho , tographer, the free lance and the amateur. The amateur who fol ' lows the fire engines, who never took a night shot before, who "r- takes a picture "by guess"- a t sensational picture of a woman . plunging from a burning -hotel. It is not the hokum Hollywood . and television fictionalized into , their newspaper dramas. It is not men .working for the glory of God, '1 country and. The Associated Press. But it is men impelled or com f pelled by, a mysterious something in themselves to risk their neck, to suffer long hours of boredom, of cold and wet for the brief ex- hilaration that goes with one great picture. . Noel Imprisoned It is Bede Irvin. killed on the "J Job at St Lo. It is Frank Noel, . imprisoned in Korea for 32 months. It is Murray Becker, too busy to be scared, shooting in a furious rhythm. Holder, slide, snap. Hold . er, slide, snap. All while the burn A ing Hindenburg falls before - his ' l r- i t-! eyes ana speea urapmc. 1 It' Is two AP Pulitzer prize win- . . ners -s- Frank Noel, torpedoed in . , the Indian 'Ocean, photographing , fellow survivors begging for wa 1 - ter; and Frank Filan, bitting the beach with the Marines at Tarawa . Filan survived thei war but died : of cancer in 1952.' It is Joe Rosenthal climbing . SuribachL for the Marine ---flag-: raising and Max Desfor "focusing on the refugee-jammed bridge , near Pyongyang, both shooting their way to Pulitzers. It is Rudy Faircloth ' turning . over blank plates to a furious Klu Klux Klan mob while he makes off with the real thing. - - It is men on burros, on dog sled. - on skis, going-up mountains for , a plane wreck . picture! or down snowbound valleys for a stranded train. It is the motorcycle boys in the traffic-clogged cities rush ing the stuff back to the office, the boys in the dark room, the Jewish Burial Caverns Found JERUSALEM UH Workmen digging foundations for a house in the Israeli sector of Jerusalem have found a number of Jewish burial caves believed to be .2.000 years old. Bones, pottery and glass vessels dating from the time of Herod were . uncovered. . One burial urn carried the inscription, in Greek. "Rufus who is DanieL Apparent ly the Roman name was added to the original Hebrew name. Photos Sent by Discoloring Paper Strip With Electriiity NEW YORK .Did you ever try to discolor paper with electri city? " 1 That is the broad principle in volved in news picture reception by wirephoto on Associated Press Photofax .equipment, used by many television stations and by some newspapers in receiving pic ture copy from AP's network. . The photofax machine receives electrical impulses during wire photo transmission much like other picture-receiving equipment The final result occurs vhen these im pulses, through special electrodes, hit a roll of recording paper which has been specially treated chemi Wirebhoto Shoves Fatal Crash in Alabama - 1 1 i MONTGOMERY, Ala-Fonr Montgomery residents including Hoke and snortsman. were killed Friday night when vandigrurs private storm near Montgomery. Vandigriff was president of the . Montgomery Rebels in the Sooth At lantic League. The party was returning from the Gator Bowl football game ia Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Wirephoto) I ' men on the desk. , It is the tiny photo-electric cell which sends an 8x10 inch picture in the eight minutes over thou sands of miles. It is the small portable transmitting unit as ubi quitous as the weather, sending from wherever there is a phone line, from the: men's room of the Cleveland ' stadium .during the World Series, I from the basement of the Capitol during a joint ses sion of Congress, from the small dining room of somebody's home 300 yards from the gates of Sing Sing, where the Rosenbergs were executed, from a Pennsylvania hotel room high over a flood, while a lobby switchboard stands up on blocks. f It is Preston Stroup shooting the finish of the Kentucky Defby, rac ing through the crowd to a dark room 200 yards away, developing, making prints, getting his first picture on the wire within nine minutes of the finish, and then asking, VWho won?" .It is 6-footj 5-inch photo editor Bill Brown developing negatives in a Montreal bank vault 6-feet, 2-inches high to be as near as possible to the portable transmit ting' pictures' of the King and Queen's arrival in 1939. " ' During most of the years before Wirephoto, news pictures were distributed by a variety of meth ods, none of them fast or always reliable. They . were shipped Jay train, plane,!, car, or, in- some cases, even by carrier pigeon. Fast train 5 mail took 84 hours across country, in those days, air express took 24 hours, barring bad weather. Rival picture syndicates fought each other for plane space. It was not uncommon for one to swipe the opposition's pictures or to talk a pilot into throwing the other fellow's package away and substituting your own. In the Twenties, somepacture agencies ' even tried a strange method of talking pictures over a phoneJ f ' At one end of the line,, a man set up a transparent grid over a photograph before him. At the other end, a man had a blank sheet of paper, the same size as the photograph, and a grid over it. : J - . ' --. Shaded Square ' , The first!, man described the squares under the grid as black, white or gray and the second man simply shaded in his squares ac cordingly. What they ended up with was a "drawing, not a photo graph, and while it was crude it bore some resemblance to the i original, t . Then, in the Twenties, the lab oratories of the American Tele phone and Telegraph Co. devel oped a limited commercial sys tem, for moving , pictures . over , phone wires. Sending and receiving stations were set up in only eight cities,! almost an hour was required to prepare a picture for sending, the actual transmission was slow and the delivered picture was blurred and indistinct . - Bad as the system was, it was all that was available and AP and other gencies used it until 1933 when AT&T bandoned the proj ect Picture deliveries once again became a j matter of train and plane schedules. But Kent Cooper, then AP gen eral manager, was still nursing an old dream that a nationwide network of leased wires could be set up to flash AP pictures to AP members all over the .country. This time he didn't have long to wait 3 - - ". In 1933, Bell Laboratories, which had been experimenting along en tirely different scientific lines, an- As electrical current passes through this paper, impulses rep resenting light-colored areas of the transmitted picture create light tones on the paper, with impulses from the dark areas of the picture making dark tones. . As the j transmitted picture is scanned by a photo-electric cell on the sending machine, each tiny fraction of image is simultaneously recorded on the special paper. When a picture transmission is completed, the Photofax paper has finished its job. No other process ing is involved, The machine op erates automatically, with no man V'." j . Transmission of Color Picture Copy by Wirephoto Devised . NEW . YORK Wirephoto transmission of pictures for color reproduction in newspapers, was just a dream when AP's coast-to-coast picture network was inaug urated 20 years ago. i Associated Press engineers, how ever, had insisted on equipment of high fidelity 4- equipment which Was ! further improved over the years: Its precision was such that the machine readily could handle transmissions for color use. I Picture copy for color reproduc tion was sent by wirephoto for the firs! time in 1939, during the Wash nounced a new picture-sending ap paratus faster by far than the old Telephoto and more reliable. All the picture services were' in vited to attend a demonstration, what they saw then is substan tially ' the same way Wirephoto works today. ' j Wrapped on Cylinder An ordinary photo print is wrapped around a cylinder on the sending machine. On the receiving machine. 30 or 3,000 miles away, and connected by a leased wire, an unexposed negative is placed on an exclosed cylinder. ; At the sending point an attend-; ant i pushes a button which starts i . i" You may discover that your records are not as complete as they should be. The following services will make for a more pleasanj and care free investment program.' 1. We can provide you with complete informa ; tion on all dividends, interest, return of capi l tal, capital gains, 1 stock splits, and tax-free items for all types of securities for the year 1954. x ii ; -'Iff 2. We have "dividend booklets' properly de I sjgned to aid yli in recording this inf orma I tion in the future. These are-free without ob- ligation. Is Your Investment Program Geared for '55? 1 . . Your financial program does not necessarily change from day to day, but your investments do. They should be re-examined periodically to see that they are in keeping with your investment aims. Many securities have already realized theit-expected growth in price . . . while the price of others has not yet begun to reflect their true value. You should never make a de cision to buy, sell or hold any securities unless your financial program has been brought up to date! j We will be glad to anajyze your pres ent list of securities 'without obligation. Please phone Salem 3-4106 and we will make an appointment to. meet with you ei ther at your office, your home or Zilka, Smitherjand Company's office. Out-of-town residents please call collect. Free parking at "Car Park," High and Ferry streets G 203 Oregon Building Ala offices la Portland Enfene Medford Heed A 9 it' ; I Vandigriff, wealthy contractor Plane crasnea in a neary ram ington visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. From negatives made available by The Chicago Tribune from its three-in-one color j camera; color separation prints were transmitted to all newspapers then interested. During 1954 wirephoto transmit ted copy for newspaper, use in col or on four occasions on jthe first hydrogen explosion pictures, re leased by the Atomic Energy Com mission, on Winston Churchill with the Eisenhowers, on the solar eclipse of last summer from copy provided by The Minneapolis Tri bune, and on the opening game of the World Series. his machine as well as all the receivers on the network. As the cylinder on the sending machine rotates, it moves horizontally across a tiny beam of light. The light reflects off the photo graphic print into a photoelectric eye. Here, the reflected light rays are transformed into electrical impulses, strong or weak as the light or dark portions of the pic ture rotate past . The electrical impulses travel over the wires at the rate of 1(XU 000 impulses per minute. Each records on the receiving film at exactly the same fraction of second it, is sent The negative at v 1 This is an appropriate timo to tatxo a look at your investment program. present. ..ana future. inVESTUENT SECURITIES ! ' i - - . . i . Phont 3-410 the , receiving end is exposed to 1 exact proportion to the amount of light reflected off the sending cylinder. When developed, the fin ished print is exactly like the ode at the sending station.' : , This is what Kent Cboper and the heads of rival picture agent cies saw in the Bell Laboratories in 1933. The opposition agencies backed off. In a lingering depres sion, they were not inclined to take on a new, highly expensive project, ; WoaM he Expensive Cooper was excitbd by the de vice. It would be expensive, prob ably more than a million dollars a year, be acknowledged. But he felt that AP had to follow this trail to a new pictorial journal- isnfc he set out to try to win sup port for the project within the AP family, the member papers which make up the cooperative . news agency'. ' j The strongest opposition came , from the AP members which had ' Wheir own rival picture services. All sorts ol charges were made that the AP management was try ing to pour money into an expen sive impractical scheme; that the AP had too little experience in the picture field: that AT&T was trying, to foist obsolete equipment on the press service; that even if Wirephoto worked, the vast ma jority of members would not ben efit i The fight reached its climax at the i AP annual meeting in 'April, 1934. After long artd intense de bate, it finally came to a vote. .Wirephoto was approved by a heavy majority. f Cylinder Rotates And at 1 a.m., Jan. 1. 1935. be fore white-tied New Year cele brants and shirt-sleeved staff members, before radio announcers and newsreel cameras, the send ing cylinder in New York began to rotate. Eight minutes later. 25 cities around the country received Wirephoto's first picture a pho to of survivors of a plane 'wreck in the Adirondacks. - s This was the beginning of an operation that grew every year. The old fear that the ! network would prove too expensive for small and medium-sized papers proved groundless. Today, they make up a sizeable proportion of those receiving Wirephoto. Only one major problem re mained after that beginning in 1S35. Wirephoto gave the AP pic ture service great speed once the picture reached the machine. Now it needed maneuverability. The sending equipment then in use was bi& and required consid erable space It . meant that the Pictures had to be brought to the machines. The problem was how to bring the transmitting machines to the scene of the pictures. Within . a year, AP engineers came up with the answer: A small portable transmitter, no bigger than an ordinary suitcase, which could be plugged into any phone line. The first of these went into action in, the Pittsburgh flood of 11936 7 BSSlBMta Arthur W. Smither H. T. Smithcr Tint V. P. QVd Ralph A. Smither H. A. Willeck John Goffrttr 1955 FORECAST of economic con ditions and esti mates of earnings and dividends. Come U. phone or write for your ppy. , a FREE, 4 Salem, Oregon liver Vaneanrer, Wn. Robert Holoubek 1- East and West'AP Wirephoto is linked with the rest of the world through commercial radio facili ties. This never served more spec tacularly than1 it did during the coronation coverage of ,1953. London transmitted pictures by radio which -were piped simultane ously into the domestic Wirephoto . A i a a a . . neiworK. ai me same ume inai American members were receiv ing London's pictures, San Fran- Cisco was radioing them out to Pacific points. Thus, an 8 by 10 photo- went all the way more than 14,000 miles f from London 4- nnv way WANT TO PAY Take 2 MOD Don't Handicap Your Health end Your Appearance by going without needed Dental Plates! If you're putting it off for financial reasons, remember that Dr. Semler offers the new Transparent Palate Dental Plates on Liberal Credit Terms that practically everyone can afford. Make Your Own Credit Terms . j . . . ENJOY WEARING YOUR PLATES WHILE YOU PAY! I us . ess I Mkt a quick chang fa th aaVantagtt of Mod ern Flatai! ! if no axtrac ion St taaa'ad, coma ta fetter 10 A.M. and your nw platai will ba raaJy by 1:30 THE SAME DAY ! AT DR. SEMLER'S. NO WAITING!- Quick Same far Brofcan Platai; Musing. 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