The Sun SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1928. MARVELS OF THE AIR

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 300, 10 March 1928, Page 8

The Sun SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1928. MARVELS OF THE AIR

WHAT marvels, as yet unsuspected, are to be revealed in the use of the air? Its potentialities have only faintly been tapped; we cannot see it, but we feel its force, and we are beginning to sense its magic and to utilise it. Wireless was the wonder of the age when it successfully reproduced the tapping of Morse across great spaces; more wonderful still when it reproduced the human voice; how much more wonderful when it may now flash a picture or write a signature for all to see when the Originals are thousands of miles away! Puck, who boasted that he would “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes,” would have considered himself less nimble had he known that one day King Oberon would superannuate him in favour of an invisible elf which would place a belt round the earth in forty seconds, or less—and stamp a photograph on the buckle. Television, the latest development of wireless, is possibly the most incomprehensible accomplishment of the human mind directing unseen agencies. It travels with time; it knows no barrier in distance. Man may talk with man and each see the reflection of the other although thousands of miles apart. The day will come when, girdling the earth, a man will stand in New Zealand, and in a few seconds hear the repetition of his own voice and see the reproduction of his own face, after they have travelled through space around the entire circumference of the globe. Some time ago, President Coolidge delivered an inaugural address at Washington. In less than an hour his speech and his picture as he stood addressing his audience, were printed in the newspapers of San Francisco—both sent by radio across a continent! What wizardry of the air was this, men asked. To-day this wizardry is being further exploited; the vision of science grows still keener the more it unfolds the long-hidden secrets of the universe; one great discovery is but a step to another; one perfection the moulding of new perfections. Marconi, interviewed last year, would place no limits on the future of wireless. It would be possible to convey flame and thunder; actually to pass tremendous force through the air! “I believe,” he said, “that the next quarter of a century will see developments in wireless quite as important as those that have marked the past 25 years. Looking into the future, I believe there is coming the transmission of power by wireless; I am further convinced of the transmission of television and moving pictures by radio. Within ten years? Yes. The beam system will be fitted for the transmission of power, and employing that system .. . power will be received at any distance. . . . Tides have been harnessed by wireless to a limited extent; there may be further developments in that direction that will prove it practicable to generate immense power. The potentialities of the power of the heat of the sun are unlimited; there are possibilities of extracting that heat and putting it to work. At no distant date we shall be obtaining all the heat we require—and heat is power—out of air and water.” Even to-day, distant mechanisms are being operated from an automatic device named the televox—a veritable man of metal—which responds to the human voice conveyed by wireless. “.Robot,” this automatic servant is aptly named, and it is claimed that in the future its uses will be boundless. To-day, too, wireless not only conveys the voice; it will photograph it. It will photograph music. Sound records are now made on photographic film by means of a phonophotographic camera. When the film is developed lines may be seen climbing and descending the vocal scale! And from wireless has evolved that which will subjugate the most fearful force of the elements. Those same wires which dash the electric spark into the ether to spread through space, suspended from high, steel masts, prevent lightning discharges in or around the objects they protect—they “stop the lightning before it starts!” This is the Cage system, which changes the type of lightning from an “impulsive rush” or flash to leakage or dissipation, so widely distributed in time and space that no destructive discharge can take place within the protected area. Again one asks: “What next?” It is the age of marvels, one succeeding the other until the marvel of yesterday is the commonplace of to-day. The world spins with ever-increasing rapidity “down the ringing grooves of change.”