Company With £250,000 To Take Up N.Z. Invention

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 450, 4 September 1928, Page 1

Company With £250,000 To Take Up N.Z. Invention

Reproduction of Sound

(United P.A. —By Telegraph — Copyright) (Australian and N.Z. Press Association) (United Service)

Reed. 9 a.m. LONDON, Monday. Mr. John Maxwell, chairman of the British International Pictures, Ltd., has acquired an interest in Rod’s Patent, Ltd., New Zealand, which has a new process for the reproduction of sound. He is forming a European company with a capital of £250,000, to purchase the European rights. The 10 years’ efforts of Mr. A. E. Rod. of Day’s Bay, Wellington, to make a new sound-reproducing instrument have not been in vain, now that his invention has been, taken up by one of the most able of English commercial men, Mr. John Maxwell, chairman of British International Pictures, Ltd. A few months ago Mr. Rod left by the Aorangi to explain his invention in America and England. The idea evidently was not appreciated in the United States. Before he left New Zealand he gave a demonstration in his studio, and his large shield-shaped apparatus, made of papier mache, impressed the visitors. When it was reproducing from a gramophone or from the Wellington wireless station it seemed much superior to the ordinary loud speaker. “One felt that the singer or the instrument was actually in the room; there was

nothing gramophoney about the sound,” said one of the visitors. RADICAL CHANGE Mr. Rod claim/d that his invention was a radical change from the longstanding principles embodied in such reproducers as the telephone, gramophone and horn and cone loud-speak-ers. These principles were first demonstrated by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell 50 years ago, and they have remained unchanged. The apparatus is a thin, flexible sheet shaped like a shield, held at one edge by a fixture and connected at the point opposite with a stylus, adapted to vibrate under audio-fre-quency impulses. Suspended like a musical string, this diaphragm is said to reproduce natural tones from the heaviest bass to the highest treble. Its size may be practically unlimited, and with an area of about three feet the full musical range can be obtained without sound reflection or forced magnification. Mr. Rod first tried his hand at inventing a new type of gramophone, but it did not give him satisfaction. Afterwards he experimented with radio. His basic principle has been incorporated in the invention which he has now sold overseas.