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First of all, let me thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm afraid that I'm still in the dark, so I'll elaborate my difficulty. This is going to be a rather long-winded affair, because I'll have to explain my understanding of the process first.
Battison says that for practical reasons, Kinescope films are made to run at 24fps, chiefly because recording at 30fps would entail buying a special projector just for that purpose, which would be an expense few stations would care to incur. Also, there is no way to reduce the pulldown time enough to capture each frame of video entirely on each frame of film; film stock simply is not strong enough to withstand that kind of sudden movement.
So, to record at 24 frames per second involves losing a certain amount of the picture. The shutter will remain open for 1/30th second, and the pulldown will occur in the time remaining: 1/24-1/30 seconds, or 1/120 seconds. This means that when the shutter opens again, half of the first field of the second frame of video has already been scanned. The shutter then remains open until the first half of the first field of the [deep breath here] third frame is scanned, and opens at the beginning of the first half of the second field of the third frame of video.
And so, looked at in terms of half-fields of video, the transfer will look like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, [5], 6, 7, 8, 9, [10], etc, where the numbers in brackets represent the half-fields missed during the film pulldown. Now that is clear enough, but then Battison goes on to say that even if these problems were overcome by somehow making film stock sufficiently strong that it wouldn't tear, and the cost could be reduced to the point that that it wouldn't be an added expense, it would nevertheless be undesirable to do so, since the anti-flickering effect of interlacing would be lost.
This is where he loses me, although he has the grace to say that it isn't obvious ("another fact which may escape cursory examination is the necessity to retain interlace.") It is just not clear to me how the process I have outlined above, which involves losing some part of the image, retains interlace when, if such a thing were possible, capturing every frame in its entirety would lose it.
One other thing I should point out is that I may have done Battison a disservice by only reproducing one page of the chapter on making Kinescope recordings. His explanation up to that point is quite clear.
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