The world has become much smaller than we imagine. If an incident is captured on a mobile device, it will likely go viral within minutes. However, the press of yesteryear didn't have that privilege. Transmitting news over unstable telephone lines was a complex task, and photographs had to take the traditional route. But in the 1930s, the concept of Wirephoto emerged. Thanks to this new technology, the transmission of photographs over telephone lines completely revolutionized journalism.
All a photographer needs these days to send images to the other side of the world is a basic internet connection and a mobile device or computer. But the story was very different at the beginning of the last century. An envelope with photographs sent by mail could take between two and four days in the best case, and be lost forever in the worst.
The need to get a story out "as soon as possible" was absolute for newspapers (and still is), but photographs formed a bottleneck... until Wirephoto appeared. As the heir to the Telediagraph designed by Ernest A. Hummel, the Wirephoto system took off around 1930, enabling the transmission of photographs over telephone lines. Its success sparked a technological race to reduce costs, improve portability of the equipment, and increase transmission speed. Would you like to see it in action?
Wirephoto: Transmitting Photos by Phone in the 1930s
The video "Spot News" from 1937 gives us a dramatization of the Wirephoto system, and how the press could obtain in minutes what used to take days. The portable equipment (installed in a van) approaches a telephone pole to establish and negotiate a connection. The photograph is processed in the van and placed on a cylinder for transmission.
Transmission is carried out one line at a time. The photo rotates with the cylinder while a beam of light is focused on it. The light scans the photograph from top to bottom, but the cylinder also moves laterally, allowing it to cover the entire surface. The light passes through an amplifier system and hits a photoelectric cell. The cell records the changes in light intensity, and those variables are converted into a signal transmissible over a telephone line.
On the other end, the signal is injected into a receiving system equipped with a neon lamp (which responds much faster to electrical changes), and from a certain point of view, the lamp light exposes the negative installed on a cylinder with the same dimensions and rotation parameters as the original. The rest is a matter of processing the negative in the traditional way and preparing the image for general distribution.
To explain the process in more relaxed terms, the video presents a demo using a rope wound around two cylinders, with fabulous results. But the most impressive thing about all this is its analog profile: there is no kind of digital protocol or negotiation here. Unfortunately, the video does not share details about the synchronization process of the cylinders, but there is no doubt that the Wirephoto worked wonderfully for decades. Associated Press dedicated an entire article to this technology celebrating its 85 years and you can't miss it.
