Gregory Gardner, age 12, of Asheville, N.C., for his question:

How does television work?

Television is a very complicated system of communication. To master it in detail, you need a back, round in several sciences, plus some training: in mechanical skills. However, like most impressive workable systems, it depends on a few rather simple principles.

It is not hard to grasp how certain forms of energy do their job to make TV work. The big problem is figuring what we have to do to make them do what we want them to do. The basic energies involved are radio and electricity. These natural forces will do nothing for us unless we understand their capabilities. 9hen we master this information, we can adapt, modify and control them to do the job.

Television is a communication system that carries sounds and moving pictures from here to there. The big job of carrying the coded signals from a broadcasting station to a home TAT set is done by high powered radio waves. Electricity is used to add the coded signals to the carrier waves.

Electrical energy is the motion of electrons, the negative particles that orbit the nuclei of atoms. Radio is electromagnetic energy. It travels through space at the speed of light, Which is about 196,000 miles per second. It fans out in straight lines and between the station and the TV set it travels silently and invisibly.

The powerful radio beam is broadcast from the station's antenna. The trick is to make the radio beam carry a multitude of coded signals. This is where electricity is used to tamper with its carrier. waves.

A broadcasting studio has highly specialized equipment to translate sights and sounds into electrical impulses. These are used to mal ~e slight changes in the carrier waves being broadcast. As the radio bean leaves the station, it carries a program of sights and sounds in the form of silent and invisible signals.

So it does until it reaches a home antenna. There the carrier waves are captured, sorted and guided into a TV set. The complicated equipment inside the TV box is designed to translate the coded electrical signals back into the sights and sounds going on in the studio.

This part of the miraculous communication system is powered by electrical current in the home. It springs into action when you turn the channel selector, which captures the radio carrier caves coring from the station broadcasting your favorite program.

The business of using radio waves to carry coded signals from here to there may sound rather simple. But the many pieces of delicate equipment needed to make it work are highly complicated. The studio uses microphones, iconoscopes and other remarkable gadgets  the home TV set has electrical circuits and still more remarkable gadgets to put the whole thing together.