Radio Round the World

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 48, 13 June 1930, Page 9

Radio Round the World

BEVERAL high-power wireless stations are now being erected in China for communication across the Pacific, and the cable companies covering this route are growing apprehensive. It is believed that China’s radio zeal is being inflamed by American capital. ALEXANDER PERTINI, an Italian lawyer who was recently arrested at Nice and charged with broadcasting anti-Fascist news from his villa there, has been sentenced in Rome to imprisonment for ten years and nine months, to be followed by three years of police supervision. A clear indication of the importance attached to radio as a means of reaching the people. 2 * = (QUEER requests are received by station directors at times, but it is scarcely possible that anybody in this’ country has gone so far as a citizen of New Jersey, described as a "mortician." He recently requested the U.S. broadeasting authorities to set aside a fixed hour daily for the nationwide broadcasting of funeral music. . % * 2 "THE manner in which various races react to the broadcast transimissions," states a writer in a French contemporary, "provides an _ interesting study in ethnopsychology. The fakirs of India make use of radio as a means of mortification; rather than flee from oscillation, they welcome it and show a truly Oriental indifference to morse. The moujiks of Russia grow long beards and sit round the loudspeaker as close together as possible in order to eliminate interference. On the Congo the negroes listen with their feet. They dance to every sort of programme, whether a talk or an excerpt from opera. Worn-out valves are used as ornaments hanging from the nostrils.’? There is also a legend about Alaska, which we cannot confirm, that during the winter the wireless waves are frozen and have to be broken up, with pickaxes, in order to render them auclible,

IN a typical American radio factory a receiver is completely assembled, tested, placed in a cabinet, and packed for shipment only two hours after a raw chassis is started on the production line. Quick work! ® * * NEW land-line, 300 miles ‘long, is being installed in Northern Ontario, and is to be operated on the "wired wireless" principle. This will make it possible for eight persons to converse at one time over the same pair of wires, or for two people to talk and forty people to be in communication on teletype or telegraph simultaneously. Construction will be completed within a year, and the line will handle not only the increasing telephone business. between Toronto and the northern Ontario mining districts, but will be a link in the Atlantic-Pacific system. On’ the completion of this transcontinental project persons in Halifax will be able to talk to Vancouver over an all Canadian route with perfect audibility. bd * Bd (GERMAN trains will shortly be fitted © with an automatic stopping device, ° operated by a flashing beam of light which is reflected back to a locomotive from mirrors on signal posts. From a small searchlight on the front of the engine a narrow beam of light is. directed upward. The mirror on the signal post reflects the beam back to one of a ring of light-sensitive célls surrounding the searchlight. This starts an electric current which makes a visible signal in the engine cab. ‘If the engineer does not respond promptly to this signal, the train is stopped automatically. Movement of the mirror on the post determines which cell receives the reflected light, each cell giving a definite signal to the engineer With this system all the complicated apparatus is on the locomotive where it can be adjusted and repaired in the yoadhouse instead of along the right: of way, as has been the case with other electrical signal systems for the same purpose.