RADIO FACSIMILE May Print "Newspapers of Tomorrow"

Details of The New York Times-WQXR-FM facsimile
edition published experimentally early this year

Facsimile has come of age; the FCC has set standards, opened FM channels to commercial faxcasting, and given the promising young medium its blessing. How the varied possibilities of fax will be put to work by broadcasters is any one's guess, but one sample has been provided by WQXR-FM, The New York Times station.

Before describing the Times-WQXR-FM fascimile operation, which introduced the new medium to thousands of people in Manhattan, it may be well to explain fax briefly.

Facsimile is the system for transmitting pages of graphic material-anything that can be printed in a newspaper-by wire or radio and receiving them in permanently recorded form on paper. The postwar high-definition facsimile standardized by the FCC uses FM radio to deliver four magazine size pages regular in a regular 15 minute broadcast period. The fidelity with which both pictures and type are reproduced at the receiving end is amazing.

The facsimile system used by WQXR-FM devised by John V. L. Hogan, president of WQXR and WQXR-FM, head of Radio Inventions, Inc., and Faximile, Inc. and a pioneer in radio development. The Hogan “Faximile System” works like this:

A page of printed or pasted-up text and pictures is wrapped around the drum of a “scanner.” As the drum revolves, a photocell “scans” the page line by line (105 lines to the inch), changing the graphic material into a fluctuating current. This current is amplified and otherwise modified, and then is used- just like the signal from a microphone to modulate an FM carrier wave.

When this FM signal is picked up by an FM receiver (or AM receiver with FM converter), it is changed back into an AM current and fed into the facsimile “recorder” instead of to the loudspeaker. The recorder (about the size of a standard record-player and changer) contains a roll of paper which has been treated so that it will conduct current. As a motor-driven reel pulls the paper be-tween two thin metal blades, the facsimile current is fed into one of the

Radio and Television News/August 1948 Franklyn K. Lauden/Newspaper Publisher's Faximile Service