From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> And I believe that may have been a Fairchild Scanagraver or some
> variation of it. The actual scanagraver was a device for carving an
> image copy with a tiny chisel driven by the britness of the image
> being copied, using a fairly coarse, 65 or 75 dpi, engraved version
> of what became in later years, the half-tone process. The plastic
> sheet, once engraved, was then removed from the drum and glued to a
> flat block of cherry an inch thick, ready to be inked and put on the
> front page of the weekly rag with the normal output of a linotype
> machine wrapped around it.
Analog Fax had a gray scale mode. And Mil Std 161 digital facsimile
has a gray scale mode with some 8 shades of gray we could print.
> It would have been a simple matter to replace the plastic sheet with
> paper, and bang it with a pen, and was one of the ways that
> newspapers shared important pictures in the late 40's and early 50's.
> Occasionally, you could even recognize the folks in the pictures, it
> was that bad. Wire photos that way were quit expensive as the
> britness info back then was a variable frequency oscilator, and that
> was very slow, about 50 dots of the picture a second over the voice
> grade lines of the day. One picture was a major long distance bill
> from ma bell. Locally made copies were pretty good though. Not as
> good as todays offset stuff, but usable.
Speed was the other driving force for Group 3 facsimile. {^_-}
{^_^}
