This article describes how journalists sent photographs across the Atlantic “instantly” in 1926. The most amazing thing to me is that the image is literally digitized into “pixels” along a helical scanline, quantized into 5 levels of gray—all through analog means.
So utterly fascinating.
An enterprising person could have used the 5 hole punches to encode 32 levels of gray, or used maybe 3 holes to encode 8 levels of gray, saving 40% of the transmission cost at the expense of making the machines more complicated…
