Marvels of Scientific Invention: An Interesting Account in Non-Technical Language of the Invention of Guns, Torpedoes, Submarine Mines, Up-to-Date Smelting, Freezing, Colour Photography, and Many Other Recent Discoveries of ScienceCorbin, Thomas W.
Science
Marvels of Scientific Invention: An Interesting Account in Non-Technical Language of the Invention of Guns, Torpedoes, Submarine Mines, Up-to-Date Smelting, Freezing, Colour Photography, and Many Other Recent Discoveries of Science
Corbin, Thomas W.
Inventions
The supreme advantage of this method of working, over that of Professor
Korn, is that the operator can see what he is doing. To obtain good
results, a number of electrical adjustments have to be made, and whether
he has got them right or wrong can be seen as soon as the picture begins
to grow upon the receiving paper. If a little readjustment be needed the
operator sees it and can set things right before the really important
part of the picture begins to appear, whereas with the Korn apparatus he
does not know what is happening at all, since he can see nothing until
the picture is finished and the photographic paper has been developed.
It will be apparent, too, to anyone who has carefully considered the
wireless telegraphy chapters, that it ought to be possible to make the
sending stylus or its equivalent control a wireless transmitter and a
wireless receiver to operate the receiving stylus, so as to be able to
send pictures by "wireless." Experiments to this end have been made with
some measure of success, and sooner or later we are almost sure to hear
that the difficulties, which are by no means small, have been overcome.
But we cannot conclude this chapter without a fuller reference to that
marvellous invention, the telewriter.
In this a man makes a sketch with a pen on a piece of paper, or maybe he
writes a message, and simultaneously a pen, hundreds of miles away if
need be, does precisely the same thing. The receiving instrument draws
the sketch line by line, or it transcribes the message in the actual
handwriting of the sender. A little touch, almost weird in its
naturalness, is that every now and then the receiving pen leaves the
paper and dips itself into a bottle of ink, after which it resumes its
work at the very spot where it left off.
Now how the complicated lines and curves, the strokes and dots which
make up a written language, even the little shakes and defects which
give each man's writing a personality of its own, how all these can be
sent over a wire is at first sight very difficult to understand. The
inventor of this apparatus has discovered an extremely simple way of
doing it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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