THE HUMAN VOICE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 10168, 25 July 1924, Page 5

THE HUMAN VOICE

magnified by the thermionic VALVE. Of the many important scientific attainments rendered possible by the pi operties of the three-electrode thermionic valve, one of particular interest at the present moment in its use in magnifying the sound of the human voice to enable a speaker, without particular effort/to be heard by an audience oi many hundreds o-f thousands of pei sons simultaneously. Formerly the magnitude of an audience, either in f building or out of doors, was limited by Me power of the human voice to about 0000 persons, states “Engineering, but the instrument referred to fi as nAA enab speeches to be heard by 120,00 Q people in one group, as well as by large audiences congregated in cities many hundreds of miles distant from that in which the actual speech was made. Apparatus for this purpose has been developed by the Western Electric Company, Aldwych, and lias been employed on numerous occasions m tne United States. The system, known as the public-address system, has also been employed in England, its most important application on this side of tne Atlantic having been in connection with the opening ceremony of the .British Empire Exhibition. On this occasion His Majesty’s address, delivered in hrs normal voice in a pavilion erected near one end of the Stadium, was distinctly heard by an andience of 120,000 persons in the Stadium alone, and as a number of groups of loud-speakmg ioceivers were installed in the aniuments park, the _ speech was audible throughout practically the whole of t e Exhibition grounds. The speech, an other items of the ceremony, were also transmitted by land line to London station of the British Broadcasting Company, whence they were broadcasted by wireless telephony and also transmitted by land line telephony to the other broadcasting stations in differe*t parts of the country. They could thus be heard by His Majesty’s subjects m all parts of the British Isles, and probably by many of there in the overseas dominions,