The Bartlane system was a

wirephoto Wirephoto, telephotography or radiophoto is the sending of photographs by telegraph, telephone or radio. History Technologically and commercially, the wirephoto was the successor to Ernest A. Hummel's ''Telediagraph'' of 1895, which had tran ...

technique invented in 1920 to transmit digitized newspaper images over submarine cable lines between London and New York. Named after its inventors Harry G. Bartholomew and Maynard D. McFarlane, it was the first

digital imaging Digital imaging or digital image acquisition is the creation of a digital representation of the visual characteristics of an object, such as a physical scene or the interior structure of an object. The term is often assumed to imply or include ...

system ever invented. It was first used to transmit a picture across the Atlantic in 1921. Using the Bartlane system, images could be transmitted across the Atlantic in less than three hours. The images were initially coded with 5

gray level In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a greyscale (more common in Commonwealth English) or grayscale (more common in American English) image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample represent ...

s, but this number was increased to 15 in 1929. At the transmitter, the pattern on the telegraph tapes were made using special printing devices and decoded into the image at the receiver using telegraph printers equipped with appropriate

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s. This system was also adapted with a photographic process in order to get more precise images in 1929, so that at the receiver the images were converted to a chemical medium.

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