Weighs Only 65 Pounds, Complete 📸
The beast of a machine that allowed photojournalists to ship off photos. They claimed it was portable!
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These days, we take for granted the fact that we can literally take publishable photos using our smartphones, but there was once a time when sending photos from far away was often a very painful, back-breaking process.
The Associated Press, which had to come up with an efficient way of distributing wire photos to newspapers across the country, found a solution in the form of a large suitcase that essentially carried around a fax machine of sorts, which could transmit images through the telegraph system.
Why was it so huge? Well, it was doing quite a lot. Per a 1935 speech by AP President Frank B. Noyes:
The wirephoto attendant In Los Angeles presses a button on the sendIng machine. It sets the cylinder into motion at 100 revolutions a minute. Lengthwise across the cylinder, at the rate of an inch a minute, moves what is called the scanning equipment. A light beam, thrown onto the picture as it revolves, is reflected through a tiny aperture a hundredth of an inch square. Two duralumin ribbons, only six one-thousandths of an inch wide, vibrate across this aperture. They close or open in proportion to the amount of light reflected from the picture. The light, which passes between the ribbons through the aperture is converted by a photo-electric cell into electric impulses. The scanning equipment thus picks up the picture in fine lines a hundredth of an inch wide, at the speed of 100 lines a minute. It moves an inch a minute across the cylinder. transmitting each minute in the form of electric impulses a strip of photograph one inch wide and 11 inches long.
And that was the version that the company launched with, which was stationary. It wasn’t until 1941 that the company came out with the portable version shown above. Still, at 65 pounds, it was really stretching the definition of portable.
On the plus side, technology kept improving, and by the early ’80s, they finally managed to get the thing smaller than a breadbox, in the form of the AP Portable Picture Transmitter. Later technologies moved to modems and then satellites. Now, we can do all of this with our phones.
» Wanna know more? Check out the history of phototelegraphy over this way.