Distant Electric Vision

REFERRING to Mr. Shelford Bidwell’s illuminating communication on this subject published in NATURE of June 4, may I point out that though, as stated by Mr. Bidwell, it is wildly impracticable to effect even 160,000 synchronised operations per second by ordinary mechanical means, this part, of the problem of obtaining distant electric vision can probably be solved by the employment of two beams of kathode rays (one at the transmitting and one at the receiving station) synchronously deflected by the varying fields of two electromagnets placed at right angles to one another and energised by two alternating electric currents of widely different frequencies, so that the moving extremities of the two beams are caused to sweep synchronously over the whole of the required surfaces within the one-tenth of a second necessary to take advantage of visual persistence.