City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

THE QUEST FOR REMOTE VIEWING 37
competing with inventor-entrepreneurs like Wheeler. General Electric and
AT&T recruited cadres of engineers and scientists to deal with increasingly
complex technologies. With large teams and healthy corporate bank accounts,
the new research labs had resources that old-fashioned inventors
couldn’t match. Even as lone inventors complained that the corporate labs
lacked the spark of genius, the new teams cranked out new developments.
The Radio Corporation of America, founded as a trust to hold radio patents,
developed increasingly powerful transmitters that spanned greater distances.
Television would prove a crucial battleground. By the early 1920s, electronic
technology had brought radio broadcasting to the threshold of practicality.
When conditions were right, radio waves could carry voices across
oceans, and the technology was improving steadily. To a handful of men,
television seemed a logical extension of radio.
The early leaders were John Logie Baird in Britain and C. Francis Jenkins
in America. Their approaches shared many crucial features. They agreed that
images had to be built up by scanning the scene in a way that sampled light
intensity at one point at a time, then reproducing the image point by point
and line by line on a display. Baird and Jenkins gained early leads by building
mechanical scanners that looked through holes in spinning disks. Both men
were old-school inventor-entrepreneurs with enough charisma to raise money
to pursue their visions.
Born in Scotland in 1888, Baird was a blend of visionary engineer, entrepreneur,
and self-promoter, with perhaps a dash of crackpot to add spice. He
had made a series of inventions—none gloriously successful—before he
turned to television in the winter of 1922–23. Success took a while. His
landlord evicted him for failing to pay the rent the following year, 7 but in
April 1925 he conducted the first public demonstration of television, at Selfridge
Department Store in London. The image showed only eight lines per
frame—but it was witnessed by the public, and Baird made the most of the
publicity to raise money for further development. Later he built the first television
system used by the British Broadcasting Corporation, using a spinning
disk to scan a 30-line picture. 8
Like many other inventors, Baird filed patent applications prolifically to
protect his ideas. He accumulated an impressive 178 patents from the start
of his television work until his death in 1946. Inevitably, most never proved
practical, but they covered a wide range of ideas. One was sending an image
through an array of parallel tubes, transparent rods, or clear fibers.
Baird was groping for ways to scan images. His patent proposes a screen
that uses a honeycomb device assembled from a large number of short tubes
‘‘to produce an image without the use of a lens.’’ Collect the tubes like a
bundle of drinking straws and they can transmit images point by point. Baird
had learned the patent game well, so he wrote his application to cover many
variations on the idea. Among them were ‘‘thin rods or tubes of glass quartz
or other transparent material. ...The rods...need not necessarily be
straight, but could be bent or curved, or in the case of very fine quartz fibers,
could be flexible.’’ 9