Belin, Édouard

Édouard Belin, (born March 5, 1876, Vesoul, France—died March 4, 1963, Territet, Switz.), French engineer who in 1907 made the first telephoto transmission, from Paris to Lyon to Bordeaux and back to Paris, using an apparatus of his own invention. The first transatlantic transmission was made in 1921 between Annapolis, Md., and Belin’s laboratories at La Malmaison, France. His equipment was adopted in Britain in 1928. It was used almost exclusively by European news media during the 1930s and ’40s, when the term “Belino” came into general use for all kinds of picture transmission.