TELEPHONES THAT SHOOT

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 101, 14 September 1912, Page 5

TELEPHONES THAT SHOOT

TINY INSTRUMENT WITH A BIG VOICE. London, July 7. A telephone that promises to' fulfil some o.f the Utopian prophecies of imaginative novelists—a telephone that talks to you clearly and distinctly as you sit motionless in you chair—is at present working in a building not a stone's throw from Piccadilly Circus. The present need for speaking—or shouting—down a mouthpiece will he obviated by this new loud-talking telephone. You will be able to walk about the room and talk in ordinary conversational tones, or even a whisper. A little instrument like a bell-push collects and carries your words, and the person to whom yon are talking—without taking up a receiver, without lifting a finger —hears you as distinctly as though you were only a yard away.* Your voice comes from' another little piece of apparatus— a box with a perforated opening—and when the apparatus is fixed ill a wall, so that only the opening is visible, one is ready to believe that the babble machine, born in the imagination of Mr H. G. Wells, has been made real a century too soon. The inventor of the loud-talking telephone is Mr W. Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, who for many years was one of Edison's helpers, and lie gave a press representative an opportunity to test his invention. The press representative stood in one room, with the little bell-push-like apparatus before him on a table, and, in another, some distance away, Mr Dickson or his assistants spoke, shouted, and whispered as they moved about. A whisper uttered live or six yards away from the transmitter came as clearly as an ordinary speaking voice in the same room. So greatly is the sound of the voice magnified, that the ordinary tones, spoken closely into the receiver, as with the ordinary telephone, seemed like a deafening shout to the listener in bin* other room. The. new telephone as yet has been tried only over comparatively short distances, with "the. idea of providing a perfect means of int?r-eoramuiiieation from room to room in offices or factories. But Mr Dickson claims that (here is no reason why the loud-lalking telephone should not lie used over any distance. Means are provided to increase or decrease the sound of the voice as it is transmitted through the new telephone, and there is no reason why a public speaker should not harangue a hail full of people without stirring from his own fireside.