"ON THE DOTTED LINE"

That much abused figure of the past.--the modest-minded individual fresh from a bath who wrapped himself in a blanket before answering the telephone.--is likely to find his precaution a painful necessity if the results of future experiments in wireless photography keep pace with the present. While it is not possible to see by radio, the great advance that is being made in reproducing pictures through the air is shown by last Saturday's achievement, when a photograph transmitted by wireless from Rome was received and reproduced in Bar Harbor forty minutes later and published in the New York World the next morning.

The feat was made possible by the experiments of Dr. Arthur Korn, professor of electro-physics in the Berlin High School of Technology, who has been working on the idea since 1900. Dr. Korn's process is based on the fact that a half-tone newspaper or magazine picture, if examined through a strong magnifying glass, is seen to be made up of hundreds of tiny dots, varying in size and shade, the dark dots being large and the light ones small. Photographs under the new system are translated at the sending end into groups of letters, each letter representing a certain degree of darkness or lightness. To de-code the message at the receiving end a special instrument is necessary. This is a form of typewriter which, instead of reprinting the letters, reproduces the dota that they represent.

Other attempts at wireless photography have been made in the last two or three years, but none with the success of Dr. Korn's experiment. The picture just produced, though lacking in distinctness, gives great hopes for the future. The basic method is sound, and with the perfecting of the process which will come with time, the possibilities of the invention are almost without limit.