The First Downloadable Newspaper
Print or digital is a burning question with many traditional newspapers and journals finding that they increasingly have to share content digitally to attract readers and advertising revenue. Many of us download newspapers or articles on to our digital devices or use on-line news aggregators to obtain our fix of news and opinion. It may come as a shock but the idea of a downloadable newspaper is at least ninety years old, just constrained by the limits of the technology of the time.
During the 1930s the emergence of radio stations, both public and commercial, seemed to pose an existential threat to newsprint. Some like William Finch, though, saw that the two media could strike up a symbiotic relationship by delivering newspapers direct to the living room using the emerging radio facsimile technology. In 1935, after founding Finch Telecommunications Laboratories, he set out to make the vision a reality.
RCA had already developed a facsimile system, but they saw it as a tool for business. The Finch system circumvented the RCA patents by transmitting image details by varying the amplitude of an audio tone, instead of its frequency, and recreating the image by generating an electric current at the tip of a stylus to trace the image on to thermally sensitive paper. Incidentally, this was the origin of the thermal paper used in cash registers to this day.
The transmitter and receiver were synchronized using the 60 Hz line frequency and the scanning head focused a pinpoint scanning spot on the document. One motor moved the scanner across the page while another advanced the page at the end of each scanning line which was marked by low-frequency sync pulses. The result was an audio signal that could be fed into any conventional AM transmitter.
Housed in a 12-inch square wooden box that could be connected to the speaker of any radio receiver, Finch receivers retailed at $125 and used continuous rolls of thermal paper 5 inches wide which sold for a dollar and would last about a week. The downloading process was far from instantaneous, taking about twenty minutes to produce a twelve-inch page, but by using a timer to capture transmissions from an AM station overnight a six-page, two-column news bulletin could be produced in around six hours.
Several radio stations received Federal Communications Commission approval in 1937 and 1938 to experiment with the Finch system, the first being KSTP in St Paul, Minnesota. Realising that it had dropped the ball, RCA modified its radio facsimile system to enable the downloading of newspapers overnight in partnership with the St Louis Post-Dispatch’s station, KSD, in St Louis in 1937. Using a dedicated transmitter and ultra-high frequency, transmissions took place at 2 pm and the higher frequencies meant that they were less susceptible to radio static which distorted the image quality.
The RCA system came at a price, $260, for which the purchaser got an ultra-high frequency receiver and facsimile printer housed in a single cabinet. There were no controls or adjustments, all the user had to do was to keep it fed with rolls of carbon paper and white printing paper. In 1939 Crosley Radio Corp. launched its own facsimile system, Reado, at the New York World’s Fair with two models selling at $60 and $80 plus $10 for a timer.
Despite the advanced technology deployed, the systems were not a commercial success. There was no real appetite for newsprint delivered this way, receivers were expensive especially for households just recovering from the effects of the Depression, and the systems were prone to paper jams and outages with content lost because of static. Advertisers shunned the new medium, preferring either newsprint or the airwaves, there were two incompatible standards fighting for market dominance which muddied the waters, and the final death knell was sounded by the paper shortages in the Second World War.
By the time peace returned, the focus had turned to television. Finch’s company was declared bankrupt in 1952 and RCA took over many of his patents.
