Telephoning to Mars.

Auckland Star, Volume XXV, Issue 95, 21 April 1894, Page 4 (Supplement)

Telephoning to Mars.

This is Not a Wild Dream in the

Light of Recent Discoveries.

Mr Preece, the Post Office electrical engineer, gave at the Society of Arts recently the resulb of his latest experiment in electric communication without wire?. The greatest distance over which signals have been senb ia five miles. Experiments afc Loch Ness enabled speech to be maintained across an air space of one mile and a quarter, and there is now, said Mr Preece, no difficulty in communicating with outlying islands without the expense of laying a cable. He mentioned that in 1884 he found that the telegraph messages senb through wires laid in pipes down the Gray's Inn Road, were read in the telephone circuits 80 feeb away on the housetops. For a long time the idea had persisted that this effect was due to leakage, bub ib had now been abundantly proved bhab the phenomenon was nothing bub electro-magnetic induction or radiated waves passing outwards through space, jusb as heat, to use Mr Preece's illustration, radiates from a red-hob poker. Finally, he remarked, one could nob help speculating as-bo whab messages could nob be senb by bbis meana across planebary space. Sbrange, mysterious sounds are heard on all long-di3bance telephone wires, especially in the calm stillness of fche night. The sun's surface musb ab such times be violently disburbed by elecbrical storms, bhe radiabions from which must be sent oub through apace. Ib is nob a wild dream to say that we may yet hear on this earth a thunderstorm in the sun, or even communicate by telephone with the planeb Mara.