Did you hear about the fight between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao that took place on May 2, 2015? It’s hard to understand how you wouldn’t have (for there was something about it everywhere!), but in case you do fall in that category, suffice it to say it was a professional boxing match that was dubbed as the ‘Fight of the century’.
The hype during the build-up to the event was phenomenal, but the fight as such failed to impress as Mayweather won the contest by unanimous decision. But then, it wasn’t the first time that a much-hyped event failed to meet expectations - not even the first in the sport. For the ‘Battle of the Century,’ the boxing fight between American Jack Dempsey and Frenchman Georges Carpentier that took place at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in New Jersey, suffered a similar fate.
Wait a minute… Why are we discussing boxing here? Oh yes, I almost forgot!
Edouard Belin was a Frenchman who invented a phototelegraphic apparatus called the Belinographe. Invented in 1907, it enabled telephoto transmission by wire and one of the first transmissions on a belinographe was from Paris to Lyon to Bordeaux and back to Paris.
Le Matin, a French daily , obtained the exclusive usage rights of the machine. By sending and receiving photographs over telephone and telegraphic networks, the newspaper could provide the readers with photographs and autographs from across Europe.
So ahead of the fight on July 2, 1921, when Le Matin approached Belin to ask him if it was possible to send a picture of the fight by wireless from Jersey City, he quoted Napoleon and said “Impossible is not a French word.”
How did it work? The belinograph included cylinders upon which the photo to be transmitted was placed. The sending and receiving ends had identical cylinders that were turning at the same speed. The shading of carbon on the photograph dictated the amount of current from the sending end. The receiving end then reproduces the intensities based on the current flow. The ray of light being projected on the cylinder rotating with the photographic paper was thus able to mimic the original photo in a matter of minutes.
The problem now was that this had to be done wirelessly. Belin made his improvements and his instruments could work based on the wireless currents as received upon the antennae. The preliminary test of sending photographs and documents by radio waves from the Bordeaux wireless station to Paris was successful.
Twist in the tale Then again, there was a twist in the tale. The engineers, who were at once sent to New York to make the necessary arrangements there, were delayed on the ship and reached only on July 1, 1921. With less than 24 hours to go before the scheduled match, it turned out to be impossible to install and regulate the instruments on time.
So the first transatlantic transmission using a Belinographe was carried out on August 4, 1921, when a written message from the managing editor of The New York Times addressed to Le Matin in Paris was scanned and sent in seven minutes. It wasn’t technically a photograph, so as to speak, but since the process remained the same, it indicated the beginning of transatlantic transmission of photographs.
While Belinographes no longer exist, the principle that modern photocopiers utilise is very similar.
Oh! And if you are wondering who won the “Battle of the Century,” Dempsey knocked Carpentier unconscious a minute and sixteen seconds into the fourth round. The fight, in all, had lasted for 11 minutes - from 3:16 p.m. to 3:27 p.m.
Reach A.S.Ganesh at ganesh.a.s@thehindu.co.in
