TELEGRAPHY UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9550, 24 July 1909, Page 3

TELEGRAPHY UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

I Cheaper cable rates being a ques- | tion of the moment, there is much I interest in an article in the "World's Work" on the dfrect telegraphic route J between London and the East. A message can now be sent direct from London to Calcutta, or even Kangoon This is the result of eleven years of hard work. The wire, starting from London, makes a bee-line of 115 miles to Lowestoft, and then dips under the North Sea to Emden,whence it runs to Berlin, Warsaw, and Odessa. After leaving the Black Sea the real difficulties of construction were encountered. The line had i to cross the Caucasus, "leaping from crag to crag, spanning yawning ravines, bridging wide rivers, and passing through dense forests on to Tiflis." Broad paths had to be cut in the dense vegetation, so that the fragile wire should be out of the reech of falling branch or treee. Between Tiflis and Tabriz lie dense forests, mountains, and deserts, and south of Tabriz are 381 miles of desert before Teheran is reached. From Teheran, where the line becomes a singlo wire the route is to Kurrachee in North-Weatern India. The maintenance of the line i« no easy task. To the storms of the mountains and frosts of the plain have to be added the fondness of the nornand Persians for shooting at the insulators, and civil war. In Southern Russia there is a severe kind of hoar frost that forms a sheet of ice bewtsen one wire and another, so that the slightest vibraiton may snap a wire. The staffs in the Persian offices have had a bad time this last year or two. A cable message on Tuesday morning last stated that the , office at Teheran was, repeatedly ; struck by shells and bullets, but the staff stuck to their posts. The sp.me kind of thing has been experienced in Tabriz. "The representatives of the company have had to face inconceivable perils, experience severe privations and hai-dships in their endeavours to keep the wire intact. Time after time it has been brought down in battle, and the engineers in the height of the conflicts have been out to repair the damage." Were it not the that Persian shooting is ridiculously wild, there would have been heavy mortality in the ranks of telegraphists in Persia long before this.