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chance to know what was going on that an English chap would, anyway. And in the second place, the part I took in the thing was all by accident and no thanks to me or my brains. I was over here partly on business and partly on pleasure; my business being the bee in my bonnet over a new kind of light that a pal of mine had invented.
    You see he'd been associated with one of the big radio companies and had got interested in radio television and had been carrying on a lot of experiments. I don't know how far he got with that end of the business, but I used to go to his laboratory and watch him and now and then I'd ask some questions or make some suggestion and we'd have a lot of fun trying out my crazy ideas. Sometimes they'd work and sometimes they wouldn't, but being a professional photographer and knowing something about that business, he used to depend a lot on me when it came to matters that had anything to do with lenses or sensitive plates and so on. You see, Bob was working along new lines. He didn't have much faith in the Baird method or any of the others that had been invented. He claimed that even when pictures were sent by radio by those methods they weren't in natural colors and that even when they did show color they had to be sent from a special place all fixed up with certain kinds of light and surroundings. What he was after was a scheme for broadcasting scenes and people just as they were naturally, here, there and the other place. That is, to say, with his device—that is, the way he imagined it—a man could set up a machine in the street or anywhere else and set the thing going and the receiver at the other end would get the picture, just as he saw it, with the sounds all there. It would be like a talky-movie without a film, only better, and Bob thought the only way to get it would be with a combination camera-radio outfit of some sort.
    That's why he got me interested in his work and depended on me to help him out on the photography end of it. Well, to make a long story short, we began to get results. I can't say just how it was arranged, because Bob hasn't perfected it yet and hasn't got out his patents and I might spill the beans if I went into details. Anyhow, it was a great day when we set up the machine he'd made and pointed it out of the window at the street and adjusted the receiver over at the other end of the laboratory. Bob was to operate the taking machine and I was to look into the receiver and see what happened.
    Well, I was just about knocked out when he started things going and there before me on the screen I saw the motor cars go whizzing by and folks walking on the sidewalks and a newsie handing a Telegram to an old man on the corner, and I heard the honking claxons and the traffic-cop's whistle and all. It was just like looking at a talkie, because there wasn't any color, but just all black and white. Bob was mighty disappointed. But I thought it wonderful and told him so. But he said he'd failed and his invention wasn't any better than the others, and natural colors were what he was after, and if he couldn't get them, he'd junk the whole thing. Well, of course, I could see that colors would be a lot better, so we got busy again. About that time I'd been doing a lot of work with color-screens and I'd been reading up on color photography and everything I could get hold of on color. One of the things that impressed me was that according to what I'd read there really wasn't any such thing as color anyhow. It was all a matter of waves. Light was just vibratory waves like radio waves and heat was another kind of waves, and heat waves could be made into light waves and vice-versa. It was all just a matter of the length of the waves whether a thing was blue or green or red or any other color. But, of course, everyone knows that, so it's just wasting time to talk about it. Well, anyhow, I hadn't known it before and it seemed a wonderful thing to me and set me thinking.
    I laid awake pretty near all