New York, May 7 (AP)—An ordinary photographic negative today was placed in a photoradiographic machine in Honolulu, a beam of light played through it and the complicated apparatus began clicking. One four of a second later, another machine In New York, 5,136 miles away, began dotting and dashing out a copy of the negative. Twenty minutes later the machine in New York had linked in the last dot of a complete positive—making a success of the transmission of a photograph by radio across the Pacific Ocean.
Seven times this process was repeated and seven pictures of persons and events connected with the Hawaiian maneuvers of the American army and navy of last week appeared in early afternoon editions of New York newspapers.
This was the first attempt to transmit pictures by radio and telegraph over such a distance, and the promoters of the test, the Radio Corporation of America, with the co-operation of the United States Army, hailed its success as another stride forward in the development of radio transmission of pictures.
Between Honolulu and New York not a human hand intervened in the process. Although four relays were necessary, each was accomplished automatically by linked receiving and transmitting devices. The radio photographic machine at Honolulu started the series of dots, dashes and spaces on the first lap of their journey, 29 miles by telegraph wire to the high power radio transmitting apparatus at Kahuku, island of Oahu. Automatically the wire currents were changed to radio waves for a 2,372 mile leap across the eastern Pacific to a receiving station at Marshal, Calif., which turned them again into a telegraph current for a 129 mile relay to the transmitting station at Bolinas, Calif., where once more the Kahuku process was repeated to dispatch the picture units on their transcontinental leap of 2,640 miles to the radio receiving station at Riverhead, Long Island. Into wire current once more the pictures were delivered at the offices of the Radio Corporation, Broad street, New York.
Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, ME, May 8, 1925