But, it warned its members, atmospheric storms forecast between London and New York that week “may make radiophoto transmission difficult - perhaps impossible during certain periods.” The problem: Radio waves carrying a photo signal across the Atlantic didn’t simply follow the Earth’s curvature. “Results were reasonably good,” the AP noted. Pre-coronation tests were conducted in London. So, for the coronation, AP leased a special circuit operating at the higher rate. Normal commercial radiophoto circuits of the day ran at a rate of 60 revolutions per minute AP’s wirephoto network operated at 100 rpm. To get its photos out of London, AP was relying on the “radiophoto,” which used the airwaves to transmit images. But this was more than four years before the Soviet Union successfully put Sputnik into orbit. Today, stories, photos and videos are beamed around the planet via a network of satellites. But the AP had a few tricks up its sleeve. That technology had changed little by 1953, as the world prepared for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. So, an 8 x 10 black-and-white photo took eight minutes to transmit - that is, if there was no interference on the line. ![]() The print was wrapped around a cylinder that rotated as the lamp shone its beam across the image, scanning about 1 inch of copy per minute. The photos were transmitted using a light bulb called an “exciter lamp.” “Innovation is in our bloodstream - and always has been,” says Valerie Komor, director of AP’s corporate archives.Īnother big leap came in 1935, when - after 10 years of development in collaboration with AT&T - the AP launched its Wirephoto service, using a 10,000-mile network of telephone lines to distribute pictures to newspapers simultaneously with the news report. On Saturday, The Associated Press will deploy a small army of writers, photographers, radio correspondents and video journalists to cover the coronation of Britain’s King Charles III.īut for his mother’s crowning 70 years ago, the world’s oldest news cooperative enlisted the help of an air force as well.įounded in 1846 by competing New York City newspapers looking to share the costs of covering the Mexican War, the AP used boats, barges, trains, sleighs, ponies and pigeons to get stories to its “members.” AP was an early adopter of Samuel Morse’s and Alfred Vail's telegraph - thus the term “wire service.” With the telegraph, communications technology severed itself permanently from transportation methods. It might just be the coolest caption in newspaper history: “AP Wirephoto via jet bomber from London”
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