WHAT HAPPENED TO FM FACSIMILE

How the Development of Broadcast Facsimile was Stopped by the FCC's
Establishment of Eight Inch Transmission Standards

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Of all the strange actions by the FCC in recent years, one of the most amazing has to do with facsimile broadcast service. The preliminaries excited only limited interest, the action was given little attention in the public press, but the end result was to bury facsimile under six feet of sod.

The background story can be found in past issues of this Magazine. Facsimile has been called the poor man’s television because instruments had been developed and prepared for manufacture that could be retailed for $100. To be sure, such equipment could not deliver the equivalent of rotogravured bathing beauties, but it could convey important news, information, line drawings, and cartoons.

The instruments were designed for connection to any FM receiver delivering 3 to 5 watts from a 500-ohm output. Now, the paper width for these home facsimile recorders was arrived at as an optimum compromise of recording-signal frequency, which is a controlling factor in the cost of the operating circuits, the characteristics of low-priced home FM receivers, operating power available to actuate the recorder, paper cost, and the manufacturing cost of the recorder itself and particularly the driving motor.

These factors added up to the use of 4 inch recording paper. Months of testing and experimenting with programs planned in the public interest showed that the 4 inch, recorder could perform an important service, particularly in rural areas where, incidentally, FM broadcasting has won particular favor.

This work was done by Milton Alden of Alden Products Company, in Brockton. An aspect of this situation that must be borne in mind is the fact that Alden Products, a long-established manufacturing concern had tooled up for the 8100, 4 inch recorder, and had complete production facilities available.

Very complete details of the Alden recorder were presented in a booklet entitled “Questions and Answers about Facsimile.” One of the interesting points brought out concerns the very narrow frequency band employed to operate the recorders. Only 3.000 cycles wide, using double side bands, the facsimile modulation can be added to FM broadcast signals at the upper audio range. and transmitted simultaneously with audio programs. The circuits employed for duplexing are simple and inexpensive. Operation in this manner was demonstrated at the NAB convention in Atlantic City, September, 1947, using transmission from station WCAU-FM Philadelphia. A threshold limiter was also developed to prevent small random noises from interfering with the recorder on very weak signals. In short, the 4 inch Alden recorder was a highly-perfected, commercial product, ready to be marketed.

Meanwhile, attention of the newspapers was called to facsimile as a potential competitor in the distribution of news and pictures, as well as cartoons. An organization called Newspaper Publishers’ Facsimile Service (NPFS) was formed, financed by contributions from interested newspapers, and headed by John V. L. Hogan whose station WQXR is now owned by The New York Times.

NPFS undertook the development of its own facsimile recorder. Lacking either the organization or the facilities for manufacturing, the NPFS equipment was of purely developmental design. A few scanners and recorders were built at very great expense. They were obviously not intended for sale to the general public, but suited only to demonstration purposes.

The recorders were designed to use 8 inch paper, and to reproduce photographs with a degree of detail substantially superior to newspaper printing. With the same relation of information to recorder cost that applied to the Alden design, the indicated retail price of the NPFS model was in the neighborhood of $600.

At such a price, it is obvious that it could not be sold for home use. Practical marketing experience in the radio field indicates that a facsimile recorder must be priced substantially below the smaller television sets. That is out of the question with an 8 inch design.

Moreover, the NPFS type cannot be operated from the output of the average FM broadcast receiver. NPFS has never given out specifications for a suitable receiver, but repeated efforts to find out did, eventually, elicit the information that "The mark obtained from any but the very best sets is apt to fall short of the optimum density of blackness, since to produce an adequate black mark an output of about 15 watts is necessary....The audio characteristics of some sets fail in the high frequencies. and so produce the inferior copy that is characteristic of a low-frequency subcarrier."

From this it can be inferred that most FM sets will not operate the NPFS recorder. and the cost of a special amplifier must be added to the recorder itself.

All this information was available to the FCC when it was asked to set transmission standards for commercial facsimile broadcasting.

On the basis of this information, the FCC established the 8inch paper width as standard. To understand the end result of this decision, it is necessary to ask and answer two other questions: 1) What advantage does the 8 inch recorder offer to the public over the 4inch type? 2) What decision on the part of the FCC would eliminate facsimile as a potential competitor to the newspapers?

Whatever the process of reasoning, the FCC settled on the 8 inch width as standard. There was some explanation that 8 inch transmission could be received on 4 inch recorders. To anyone experienced with facsimile, that would mean reception of type on the 4 inch machine so small it couldn’t be read.

That’s the story of home facsimile at the present writing. It’s the end of the story, unless the Commission has a change of heart. Maybe the FCC thought that facsimile couldn’t be a success if it didn’t reproduce photographs of bathing beauties. It hardly made sense to choose a system priced beyond public buying power, proposed by a group with neither production facilities nor any plan for having the recorders manufactured. But that is exactly what the FCC did. Certainly, if the Commissioners wanted to do the newspapers a favor, and stop facsimile before it ever started as a commercial enterprise. they couldn’t have adopted a more effective method than to standardize on 8 inch recording.