WIRELESS CHIEF

Hokitika Guardian, 3 May 1929, Page 7

WIRELESS CHIEF

MR DAVID SARNOFF’S ACHIEVEMENT. From SIR ' ROBERT DONALD Chairman of the imperial Wireless Committee). SOMERTOLN, March 11. At the hack of the Marconi Beam station there is a small wooden hut where trials are being made with the Marconi Company’s new method of facsimile transmission by short wave wireless. Every day marks an improvement in this epoch-making develop, ment. During the last three years various systems of facsimile reproduction have been introduced. There is the one used by the Daily Mail; another, invented by the Radio Corporation of America, is in operation between the United States and England; there is a French invention; and there are one or two otiiers. During my visit here I was accompanied by Mr David Sarnoff, the executive head of the Radio Corporation of America, a leading authority on wireless in all its phases. His opinion on the potentialities of facsimile transmission carries a great weight. Mr Sarnoff is a notable personality. At the age of 10 he landed with his parents in the United States knowing only Russian and Yiddish. At 15 he was a messenger with the Commercial Cable Company, and in the same year transferred to the Marconi Wireless Telegaphy Company of America. His rise from messenger boy, through the hierarchy of wdreless operator, station manager, and commercial manager, to executive director of the Radio Corporation has been phenomenal even in the country of great adventures, where romance is business and business is romance. Mr Sarnoff performed wonderful feats as a wireless operator, notably while in enarge of a wireless station at the top of the Wanamaker Building in New York in April 1912, on the occasion of the Titanic disaster, when he stuck to his key for 72 hours on end picking up faint and distorted signals until the entire list of survivors were received. in spite of his arduous work as operator and manager, Mr Sarnoff was able to attend technical classes, studying the science as well as the commercial side of wireless, until now, when he is only 28, lie is the chief executive director of the largest wireless corporation in the world and director of many other companies. A GREAT REVOLUTION. I asked Mr Sarnoff what he thought of the future of facsimile wireless telegraphy. He replied: It is the greatest revolution in record communication since Morse invented the tclgrapb code and made telegraphy possible. In a few years we shall have left that clumsy method of transmission far behind. The facsimile system will become the normal method of communication by telegraphy. I am convinced that facsimile telegraphy, already working on a small scale commercially, will be perfected in a few years, so that the “Daily Mail, for instance. cAuld be reproduced simultaneously in Manchester, Glasgow, Paris. Berlin, New York, Montreal, and in other cities in the far distant British Dominions.