Archive Gallery: The Future of The Movies

Earlier this year, millions of people around the globe gathered outdoors to watch live broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup. viewing parties are so ingrained in sports culture nowadays that it's difficult to imagine depending on newspapers or word-of-mouth to find out who won a big game.

In 1923, Charles Francis Jenkins, who helped invent the television, announced plans to broadcast motion pictures of world events and sporting games over radio airwaves. Although commercial radio had just begun airing live sports broadcasts, Jenkins was eager to take the technology further with an apparatus that could transmit one photograph every four minutes.His machine worked by using rapdily rotating circular prisms to cast lights and shadows onto a selenium cell in an electric circuit, which would convert the light into wireless waves. Admittedly, his invention needed work, but Jenkins was confident that with a little work, he would be able to broadcast live news events to far-off places. Since skeptics (okay, Popular Science) asked how the sun's glare would let them see outdoor broadcasts of baseball games, Norman Furber, a New York City inventor invented a special screen that could reflect images clearly as long as the sun didn't shine directly on it.

Read the full story in "To Broadcast Baseball by Radio Movies"