Human Habitation

Claire Booth Luce, when she was ambassador to Italy, came down with a strange malady. The illness was found to be caused by tiny particles from the ceilings of her residence falling into her food, which she then ate.

The tiny flakes were from the frescos painted on the ceilings of her expensive house. The substance that caused her trouble was arsenic in the paints used to decorate her quite lavish house. It is hard to believe it, but Claire Booth Luce lived in an inhumane habitation.

Arsenic in paint may be a hazard to the few wealthy people who can afford to live in a house such as the ambassador lived in. Many poor people cannot afford to live anywhere else than where they are and many of them also live in inhumane habitations because of paint.

As reported in the Washington Post for October 20, 1987, the State of Maryland launched a pilot program designed to remove lead paint from the homes of low income families in Prince George's County, one of the Maryland counties that borders on the District of Columbia, and in Baltimore City.

They have allotted $1 million to begin the process. One half of the amount, $500,000, will be spent in one 700 apartment complex housing low income families—the rest will be allotted to other jurisdictions as loans to landlords of housing deemed to contain hazardous amounts of lead. Baltimore, by far, leads the state in occurrences of lead poisoning—reporting around 80% of all cases in Maryland. Most of the hazardous lead is found in homes built before 1950 and most of the cases reported are children who inhale and ingest lead paint particles and dust.

Estimates by Maryland's housing authorities indicate the $1 million might pay for the renovation of only 130 units, but 200,000 units in the State are old enough to have lead paint. The total tab by those lights could exceed $1.5 billion.

Lead poisoning causes irreversible damage to the brain and nervous systems of infants. In older children it produces learning disabilities, behavioral and psychological problems and in adults behavior and psychological problems.

In Baltimore 750 cases were discovered in 1986. If the lead for the most part entered the environment before 1950, how many children were sacrificed to lead? And at what cost to themselves and society? It's hard to believe hazardous lead levels in homes is not a national problem. If 200,000 homes in Maryland have high levels of lead paints, what about the remaining 49 states and several territories?

Humane Habitation is an unalienable right for good reason.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .

What's New in Television?

Commercial TV has been around since 1937. Early on it was a high tech novelty—now it is the mainstay of the existence of millions of people the world over. TV has turned out to be the greatest baby sitter for the young and companion to the elderly. Children and adults alike watch thousands of hours of TV each year.

The first TV was black and white on small screens. I remember watching Herbert Hoover giving a speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention—his image on a 3" tube. The definition was great. The picture was sharp and the voice quality was good. I sat only a few feet from the screen and soon adapted to the size.

Bigger screens meant less definition, but also bigger pictures and "TV" meals were eaten off trays in the living room in front of the set. The big switch was to color. CBS and NBC fought it out, with CBS having the better system, but NBC having compatibility with the existing black and white sets. There was a compromise and a patented CBS component was added to NBC's system, so both companies profited and the compatible system was adopted.

Projection TV has been around for awhile, but seems to have been accepted only in bars for watching sports. While the image is large it is still just an enlargement of smaller tubes and the resolution is not improved.

We know TV is important in our lives and in the lives of the world, since most people seem to get their information from TV—news as trivial as the ball scores and as tragically epic as the Challenger disaster. Murder has been committed on TV (Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby) and babies have been born on TV.

TV is an important worldwide industry divided into several parts... (1) there is the manufacture of the equipment to broadcast and receive the signals; (2) there is the preparation of the programming to be broadcast; and (3) there is the actual operation of broadcasting stations.

TV is broadcast from ground stations to ground receiving stations (i.e., your home), and is broadcast ground-to-satellite-to-ground, getting much greater areal coverage.

Worldwide, the U.S. dominates TV programming, mostly through its movie industry technology applied to producing TV shows. The Japanese, through classical marketing tactics, dominate the manufacture of TV receiving sets. It was a classic case of gaining market share by underselling the competition and driving them from the marketplace. Only Zenith is a major manufacturer of TVs in the U.S. today, where a good many brands were available in the '50s and '60s.

What we lose when our manufacturers vacate the market place is the research and development for the next generation of equipment. The Japanese explosion in consumer electronics followed hard on the heels of their take-over of the TV market, and today scarcely any consumer electronics are made in the USA.

Fortunately for our balance of trade and our position in the TV market, Zenith continued research and development in TV and has just recently announced a new flat screen. They solved the problem of bonding the color mask to the tube, allowing a greater precision for activating the fluorescent materials on the screen. That allows greater resolution—that is to say, lines per inch on the tube. The flat screen is being marketed first as computer monitors, since it will command a higher price there.

Two recent announcements portend the future of commercial TV. One comes from Japan and is the announcement of a new High Density TV (HDTV) [Washington Post for October 11, 1987], the other comes from Princeton, NJ, and announces Advanced Compatible TV (ACTV) [New York Times for October 18, 1987].

The Japanese have developed a new system for broadcasting and receiving TV signals. They call it High Density TV and hope to have it available for home use in the 1990s. The system has 1125 lines per inch of picture tube instead of the present 525, and provides greater resolution and definition of the picture on the tube. Color rendition is also greatly improved. The new system allows for wide screen viewing similar to wide screen movies. This means that regular movies can be shown on the system without the ends of the frame being chopped off.

The clarity and resolution of the picture also lends itself to enlargement and for the first time high quality large pictures may be available, not only for the home, but also for the local bar and for the local theatre newly designed to take advantage of the new technology.

The resolution is so good that some movie makers are considering HDTV as the primary medium for their work. The advantages of working directly in video is (1) cost; (2) speed with which a finished product can be produced; and (3) but most importantly the ease with which the product (the movie) can be edited. Working with video is so easy electronically that most movie film is converted to video to be edited and then used as a map to assemble the finished film.

To use the Japanese system, all new equipment is required—the studio equipment and the broadcast equipment, as well as the receiving sets, have to be new and of the Japanese HDTV system. The Japanese system is not compatible with any existing equipment.

The Japanese are getting geared up to manufacture all aspects of the HDTV system for domestic consumption first—and later for worldwide distribution. This is the standard Japanese marketing plan working out the bugs and getting the economies of scale in the domestic market before going worldwide.

To adopt the Japanese system in the U.S. would require the replacement of $100 billion of broadcast equipment. The Japanese system has some other problems that will be difficult to reconcile in commercial TV broadcasting. The HDTV system, since it packs a great deal of information, needs a slightly wider band width than is currently allotted for commercial TV. In fact, it requires a band-and-a-half. The current thinking is that the improvement is so great that the accommodation will be made. It means severe crowding of channels in ground transmissions, but less crowding of channels in satellite transmission, since more frequencies are available for satellite broadcasting. The Japanese plan to use satellites exclusively for their system in the home market.

The question is: can the U.S. compete with the Japanese electronic juggernaut? It seems we can compete when it comes to basic research—the further question will be: can we compete in the market place. It's hard to believe that the VCR is a U.S. invention. RCA invented it, but apparently didn't know what to do with the invention. They bundled it with a TV so that you had to buy an RCA TV to get the VCR. Then they could not settle on the time format that satisfied the consumer. One could not record a movie on a single cassette, for instance.

The Japanese showed us how to take a good idea and make a lot of money from it. They did something RCA forgot to do: they found out what the consumer wanted and then built it for them.

News from the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, NJ, should be good news for the TV manufacturer and viewer in the U.S. It seems the researchers at the David Sarnoff Research Center have invented a high resolution TV system (they call it "Advanced Compatible TV) that can be superimposed on our present TV system. Instead of 1125 image lines transmitted by the Japanese system, ACTV transmits only 1050, and they claim the difference is not noticeable to the viewer. Moreover, they claim to work all the wonder the Japanese system will work, but do it in a single channel, eliminating the need to crowd or push present broadcasters off the scale. Whereas cable operators would have to make major modifications to their equipment to broadcast the HDTV signal over their systems, the ACTV system could be broadcast without modifying the cable system. The new equipment could be installed at the broadcasting studio and viewers could purchase the new equipment at their leisure as they did with black and white conversions to color.

The Japanese set for HDTV is ticketed at the present at about $3500—a pretty steep price for home entertainment equipment. No price is given for the U.S. system. The researchers at the David Sarnoff Labs are still looking for about 30 million dollars to complete the feasibility studies of their system and to field-test it. I assume they will not have any trouble finding the money. But, will Motorola, Westinghouse-White, Honeywell-Bull, IBM, et al, join Zenith in the fray and establish once again a viable U.S. television manufacturing industry? (GE/RCA sold their TV manufacturing to the French—so, therefore, would have to start from scratch.)

If we had a National Institutes of Manufacturing and Industrial Science and Technology (NIMIST) attached to our Department of Commerce, if our Department of Commerce were the Department of Commerce and International Trade, and if we had a Federal Industrial Bank, like the Federal Mortgage Banks or the Farm Credit Bank, I would say a domestic TV manufacturing industry would be reestablished with certainty. In the present environment, it's pretty chancy—but we can hope for the best.

© Copyright 1988
Institute for domestic Tranquility