WIRELESS TALK RAPIDLY GROWING.

Hokitika Guardian, 8 October 1920, Page 1

WIRELESS TALK RAPIDLY GROWING.

(By T. Thorne Baker.) , When you use a. wireless telephone your conversation is not carried across space and delivered to the listener at the other end. The process of speech transference is sometliing akin to sending money by post. Cash is paid ip at the post office, changed ip to npney order and tjie money order bridges the space between sendeg.,and receiver and must be cashed before the recipient gets actual money again. In telephoning by wireless the spoken words merely vibrate a simple piece of mechanism in the mouthpiece, which produces a series of electrical changes. Tliesp electrical changes produce ecu responding distortions, or malform Rions, 'upon the wireless waves which are streaming from th expending *o the receiving station. At the latter these distortions produce magnetic effects which vibrate the iron membrane of the telephone eqrpiece, and fhese vibrations, bnee again purely mpehaniea] I produce sounds just as a pina itring through its vibration produces a musical note. The vibrations produced by the human voice pfton run into many + lipu sands a second, and so, to transmit speech by wireless, very many thousands of waves per second must be sent through the ether, for obviously a hundred waves a second could not carry a thousand distortions a second, produced by a sound and so on. This is one of the reasons why wirelPss telephony came so long after wireless telegraphy. A hundred or so waves a second are ample to produce the hng or short buzzes of Morse code signals and the early systems wea-e not capable of sending out the contiimmus waves of to-day; although telephofly was readily foreseen, it could not be accomplished for this reason. So much research in wireless telephony was carried out during the vai that progress seems to-day amazingly swift. Many wonders worked but during the last three or four years arc yet to' be adapted to wireless telephony, and as they are adopted will cause f resh sensations. One of the greatest of these h probably tffe “wired wireless” of General Squier. 'lt is a system whereby v ireless waves are guided through space by ordipary telephone or telegrap' wires. One telegraph wire can “guide 1 a dozen different wirpless messages simultaneously—they need only be of different wave lengths. But whaf is more valuable, wireless conversations will, it is hoped be linked rip with ordinary telephone lines., and thus when you talk from some coast station in Great Britain to, let us say Washington, the conversation wift- be “fastened on” tp the land lines from Washington inland, to the telephone exchange and thence to the subscriber’s house. Tbps General Squier predicts i!;ni the day is ppt far distant when any individual, anywhere pn earth, will be able tp communicate direct by spoken word to any other individual, wherever he may be. , In fact ,news of progress from all sides: systems of simultaneous reception and transmission for wireless conversations, via the subscriber’s ordinary telephone line; hot-wire telephones so sensitive that faint whispers may be transmitted; and many more. We need not marvel at present progress ; so pinch of it was waiting for the valve method of generating wireless waves. Th© war hurried this through for us and made the rest comparatively easy. Wonderful and far-reaching as have'been the achievements of the last twelve months, there are more to come.