Machines That Think – Marvellous Inventions

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 134, 27 August 1927, Page 24

Machines That Think - Marvellous Inventions

T is now 51 years since Professor Alexander Graham Bell spoke seven historic words in front of a crude assemblage of coils and wires and

bits of metal on a littered work-bench in his Boston laboratory. "Mr. Watson,” he said, “come here, I want you.” In a moment Mr. Watson burst into the room in excitement. “I hear you,” he cried. “I can hear the words.” That was the beginning of the electro-magnetic telephone, and now trans-oceanic telephony by wire and wireless is a possibility. , Near one of the rivers which border Manhattan Island, where every moment sees some great ship come or go, laden with the freight that is the world's commerce, stands the building of Bell telephone laboratories, an agent of that other commerce which is a commerce of speech. Here centre the laboratory activities of the telephone industry. Here labour more than 1,500 scientific men to make the telephone still more useful than it is. In these laboratories men study every material, from the metal used for the sheaths of underground cables to the glue that fastens the wooden panels of soundproof telephone booths. Here scientists measure -the lengths and times of sound w-aves and the weights and speeds of the tiny electric particles called electrons. Here two physicists built, a year or two ago, a machine that could say “papa” and “mama” quite recognisably, when adequately coaxed. What is of more practical importance, these same machines, applied to the problems of electrical transmission of speech,

yielded facts of value in the understanding of articulation and of how best to preserve this quality when speech is sent electrically over a w ire. In 1921 Gustaf Waldemar Elmen was testing alloys of iron and other metals, hunting for some alloy w T ould have better magnetic properties than any alloy then known. This was commonly supposed to be a useless quest. Theory asserted that no material was likely to be much more permeable to magnetism than is iron. Nevertheless, Mr. Elmen, content to ignore the theory, actually discovered a material scores of times more permeable—the alloy of nickel and iron now named permalloy, and used to quicken the speed of submarine telegraphic cables. It is pleasant to record that Mr. Elmen’s discovery has just been honoured by the award of the John Scott Medal, one of the honours most highly prized by engineers, in a pre-

vious year awarded to another laboratories’ engineer, Mr. Housekeeper. Among all the thousands of inventions and discoveries which have bestarred so plentifully the record of the Bell telephone organisation, nothing is more spectacular than the one recently described in the laboratories’ own magazine as “the mechanical brain.” This is the remarkable assemblage of the machines which operate the automatic telephone exchanges now being installed in this country, and gradually introduced in London. No Frankenstein or Robot, imagined by writers of fiction, excels in competence this marvellous mechanical reality. The only part of this apparatus which the subscriber sees is the dial, which he rotates to call his number. This is merely the ear of the mechanical brain. Built up, ceiling high, in the rooms of the telephone central are the real grey cells of the mechanism. In the laboratories in New York a group of these “brains” are installed as samples and for test. The machines not only remember the number that you have asked for and repeat it, over the proper trunk line, to the central station with which you are to be connected; they also keep a record of the number of calls that you make each day; they sort out pay-station' calls from other calls; they will return your coin if the connection is not made; they even call loudly for help when injured or unwell. The social implications of this really terrifying monster are enormous. The world tends to reduce human labour. More and more of our work is done for us by machines. If it be true, as Samuel Butler so caustically warned us, that machines are apt to become our masters, not our slaves, it is equally true that they have freed us from the tyranny of labour and in a measure from the Procrustean bed of time. Leisure, for any one except a slaveowner, is a creation of machines.