picture in the shape of a very narrow, vertical rectangle. This shape created a "portrait" image, instead of the "landscape" orientationthese terms coming from the concepts of portrait and landscape in artthat is common today. The position of a framing mask before the Nipkow disk determines the scan line orientation. Placement of the framing mask at the left or right side of the disk gives vertical scan lines. Placement at the top or bottom of the disk gives horizontal scan lines. Baird's earliest television images had very low definition. These images could only show one person clearly. For this reason, a vertical "portrait" image made more sense to Baird than a horizontal "landscape" image. Baird chose a shape three units wide by seven high. This shape is only about half as wide as a traditional portrait and close in proportion to a typical doorway. Instead of entertainment television, Baird might have had point-to-point communication in mind. Another television system followed that reasoning. The 1927 system developed by Herbert E. Ives at AT&T's Bell Laboratories was a large-screen television system and the most advanced television of its day. The Ives 50-line system also produced a vertical "portrait" picture. Since AT&T intended to use television for telephony, the vertical shape was logical: phone calls are usually conversations between just two people. A picturephone system would depict one person on each side of the line. Meanwhile, in the US, Germany and elsewhere, other inventors planned to use television for entertainment purposes. These inventors began with square or "landscape" pictures. (For example, the television systems of Ernst Alexanderson, Frank Conrad, Charles Francis Jenkins, William Peck and Ulises Armand Sanabria.) These inventors realized that television is about relationships between people. From the very beginning, these inventors allowed picture space for two-shots. Soon, images increased to 60 lines or more. The camera could easily photograph several people at once. Then even Baird switched his picture mask to a horizontal image. Baird's "zone television" is an early example of rethinking his extremely narrow screen format. For entertainment and most other purposes, even today, landscape remains the more practical shape. Recording In the days of commercial mechanical television transmissions, a system of recording images (but not sound) was developed, using a modified gramophone recorder. Marketed as "Phonovision", this system, which was never fully perfected, proved to be complicated to use as well as quite expensive, yet managed to