telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (11/19/90)
William G. H. Finch, a radio engineer who in the late 1930's pioneered the development of facsimile transmission of printed matter and photographs died November 12 in a hospital in Stuart, FL. He was 93. Mr. Finch was the founder of Finch Telecommunications Laboratories in New York. He held hundreds of patents for inventions in radio communications, including the design of a machine to send printed matter and photgraphs by radio, through a process known as radio facsimile. He also developed a process for a 'talking newspaper' that would produce a printed soundtrack on newsprint, and a device to allow the reader to reproduce the sound at home. In 1938, Mr. Finch received a patent for a method by which color photographs could be sent over telephone lines to a device that would reproduce them. The advent of World War II and the development of television dampened interest in his process. He was born in England in 1897, and came to the USA in 1906. He went to school at the University of Cincinnati, and also at Columbia University. He was responsible for setting up the first radio-typewriter press circuit between New York and Chicago, and later between New York and Havana, Cuba. He served as assistant chief engineer for the Federal Communications Commission from the time it was founded (in the 1920's, out of the old Federal Radio Commission) until 1935. He was a communications officer in the Navy during the second war. A brilliant man, and one who made many contributions to technologies we take for granted these days ... dead from complications due to diabetes at age 93. Patrick Townson