'Phone from the Air

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 48, 14 June 1929, Page 9

'Phone from the Air

Success Attained

IRMEN have been presented with the means of speaking from cloudy peaks with their bosses, their, sweethearts, or anyone else of the earthbound millions who have access to a regular telephone instrument. The Western Blectrie Company demonstrated, in a series of tests for the Press, an invention linking aeroplanes on the wing to the land lines of the commercial telephone system. ‘The first call was put through by an associated Press reporter, who went aloft in the flying telephone booth at 11 a.m. and stayed up until noon. Wearing a regular telephone headset and speaking into a microphone held in his hand, he gave the telephone number of the Associated Press office in New York to the Bell telephone experimental radio station at Whippany, New Jersey, by wireless telephone. A moment later he heard the Associated Press switchboard operator respond, and was switched to the city desk, which in turn handed the call over to a rewrite man, who took the report of the demonstration from the flying reporter. Though the reporter in the aeroplane was sitting but four feet from the

roaring engine, from which he was separated only by a thin pane of glass, he could hear the people in the New York office as clearly as an ordinary telephone conversation, and his words were plainly audible in New York. The take-off was made in a driving rain, but the telephone ’plane rode above the storm, and the demonstration was made while 2000ft. over Plainfield, in New Jersey, and while the aeroplane was making about 100 miles an hour. Radio Talk from Trains. " Remarkable success that promises to revolutionise travelling on trains is announced by the radio experimental department of the Canadian National Railways, which has succeeded in sending messages from speeding coaches to centres many miles away. Complete telephonic concervation was maintained in one case for two hours, In that time the train from which the experiment was being made had moved more than 70 miles. The test, hailed as one of the most outstanding. in radio discovery of late years, Was followed by .another remarkable de monstration, when a man spoke over the long-distance telephone. on the moving train, his remarks being carried by telephone to O.N.R.T. and broads east to a radio audience. The broad east was picked up by the radio re ceiver set on the observation car on the same train from which he spoke It was the first time this had been accomplished.