From a Canadian radio trade journal, August 1945. The Tech Lords were already working on grandiose new projects using military methods for civilian purposes. I’m all for amortizing, but you need to choose the RIGHT existing technology!
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Until now, television’s main problem has been the question of “bending its beams” to make the image travel more than 50 miles. Now Westinghouse engineers come up with the idea that instead of building towers of an impractical height to attain distance, 14 B29 type planes could beam programs from an altitude of 30,000 feet, and send the programs out to areas of 211 square miles each, thus covering the whole country, or at least 78% of it. Programs would be beamed to the planes from ground stations, which would rebroadcast.
Westinghouse estimates that the cost would be $1,000 per hour per plane, and engineers say it would revolutionize television and perhaps FM too.
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In this case the RIGHT improvement already existed and was already being tried experimentally. The landline phone system was already usable for one TV program, and was soon improved to carry much higher frequencies for multiple programs. Satellite TV came along later, but it’s no better than wire cables or optical cables, except in areas where the cable infrastructure isn’t worth the expense.
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Later for amusement: Interference from domestic radio signals is a perpetual problem for radio astronomy. Recently a long-standing mystery was solved. An antenna array in the Australian desert is supposedly well isolated, with no cities nearby and a legal requirement of no radio in the area. Despite the precautions, signals kept leaking in from somewhere. Finally they’ve figured out that the signals were TV broadcasts reflected from high-flying airliners. The article went on to say that radio astronomy is going to be pretty much impossible with Elon’s dense field of satellites everywhere. No great loss. Radio astronomy is an expensive hobby, NOT a problem-solving science. Nobody lives better as a result of radio astronomy.
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