One Summer: America, 1927

was forcedto step down from the ERO and it was effectively closed in 1938. Laughlin retired to Missouri, but a huge amount of damage had been done.
    Altogether at least 60,000 people were sterilized because of Laughlin’s efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.
    In late September 1927, Carrie Buck, her legal options exhausted, was scheduled for sterilization and the procedure was carried out the following month. Her sister was sterilized as well, but without knowing what was happening. She was told she was being treated for appendicitis.

C HAPTER 27
     

     
    IN THE SPRING of 1927, just before the Snyder–Gray trial consumed the world’s attention, an arresting story appeared as the second lead on page one of the New York Time s. As an indication of its significance, the Times gave it seven stacks of headlines. It said:
     
    F AR -O FF S PEAKERS S EEN
    AS W ELL AS H EARD H ERE
    IN A T EST OF T ELEVISION
     
    L IKE A P HOTO C OME TO L IFE
     
    Hoover’s Face Plainly
    Imaged as He Speaks
    in Washington
     
    T HE F IRST T IME IN H ISTORY
     
    Pictures are Flashed by Wire
    and Radio Synchronizing
    with Speaker’s Voice
     
    C OMMERCIAL U SE IN D OUBT
     
    But AT&T Head Sees a New
    Step in Conquest of Nature
    After Years of Research
     
    The accompanying report described how reporters and officials at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Labs on Bethune Street in Manhattan had watched in astonishment as a live image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in Washington materialized before them on a glass screen about the size of a modern Post-it note.
    ‘More than 200 miles of space intervening between the speaker and his audience was annihilated,’ marvelled the anonymous reporter. Listeners could even hear Hoover’s speech. ‘Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance,’ the commerce secretary intoned with gravity and pomp.
    ‘As each syllable was heard, the motion of the speaker’s lips and his changes of expression were flashed on the screen in the demonstration room,’ explained the Times man. ‘It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that.’
    Mr Hoover was then succeeded by a comedian named A. Dolan, who first told some stories in an Irish brogue, then quickly changed into blackface and returned with ‘a new line of quips in negro dialect’. This, too, was deemed visually excellent.
    It appears, however, that the reporter may have been carried away by the emotion of the moment because the AT&T equipment was not capable of projecting really clear images. Realizing this, AT&T abandoned all attempts to conquer television soon afterwards, and left the field open to others, of whom there were many.
    As a theoretical notion, television had been around for some time. As far back as 1880, a French engineer named Maurice Leblanc saw that images could be sent a bit at a time because the eye retains an image for about a tenth of a second and thus can be fooled into seeing intermittent images as whole ones. It’s why wesee movies as a continuous show rather than as thousands of individual frames. That considerably simplified the challenge of transmission.
    Four years later, a German named Paul Nipkow invented a system using a spinning disc to scan images on to a sensor through holes placed at calculated intervals around the disc. It was a tricky proposition and Nipkow failed to make it work, but his disc became the standard on which nearly all subsequent attempts at creating television were based. The term television itself was coined by a Franco-Russian inventor, Constantin Perskyi, for the Paris Exhibition in 1900, though many other names were used for various devices in the early days – iconoscope, radiovisor, electric eye, even electric telescope.
    By the 1920s four parties were thought to be close to breakthrough: teams at Bell Laboratories and General Electric in the United States and the individuals Charles Francis Jenkins in Baltimore and John Logie Baird in Britain.
    For all the effort and anticipation, no one knew quite what television would be good for. The general assumption was that the applications would mostly be practical. Scientific American , in an article entitled ‘Motion Pictures by Radio’, foresaw television