[GreenKeys] OT Fwd: News by Radio Fax 1920 - 1930

[Jim Haynes]

On Sat, 3 Dec 2016, Duncan Brown wrote:
>
> Imagine getting up in the morning and picking up a freshly printed newspaper 
> from your broadcast receiver. That technology was available in the 1930s!
>
That's a folly that was repeated several times.  I remember seeing an RCA
broadcast receiver with a slot in the front for a narrow paper to come
out through, and also pictures in magazines like Popular Mechanics for a
fax recorder built into the arm of a chair.  The RCA receiver used a
technique of a bar beating against paper and carbon paper to make the
marks.  1960s fax technology was more like electrolytic action, using a
wet paper and a metal band that was eaten away by the process.  And there
was Western Union's Teledeltos electrosensitive paper.

If you look at a newspaper's printing press in action, and compare that
with the slow speed of fax, especially in the days before any kind of
image compression, you see why newspaper by fax would never make it.

Now there was a time, 1960s perhaps, when the Wall Street Journal was
transmitting itself by fax to a printing plant on the West Coast, using
as I recall very high speed telephone circuits and machinery made by
Xerox.  But that was not direct to subscribers since the fax machinery
was very costly.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is produced in Little Rock.  They have
a secondary printing plant in NW Arkansas which produces an edition with
most of the same content as the Little Rock paper and some local content.
The company uses a fax-like process to transmit offset printing plates
from Little Rock to NW Ark for printing the local edition.  When it's
all in operation the papers come up a conveyor at a speed of several per
second from the printing machinery, all folded and assembled into 
sections.