TELEGRAPH DEPARTMENT

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 156, 29 March 1926, Page 6

TELEGRAPH DEPARTMENT

NEW CHIEF ENGINEER MR. A. GIBBS APPOINTED The Postniaster.Geueral, the Hon. Sir James Parr, has announced the appointment of Mr. A. Gibbs to the position of Chief Telegraph Engineer, which recently became vacant owing to the retirement on superannuation of Mr. E. A. Shrimpton.

The new Chief Telegraph Engineer was born in Dunedin in 1877, and was educated in the Dunedin public schools and Technical College, and in Otago University. He entered the. Post and Telegraph service in Dunedin in NoVern'ber, 1891. After being attached to the operating room staff for ten years he was appointed to the District Telegraph Engineer’s office at Dunedin, where he qualified for promotion in the engineering branch, which he entered in 1906. In 1911 he was transferred to Wellington as Acting-Chief Electrician, in the absence of Mr. T. Buckley, who was away on a world’s tour of inspection.. Later Mr. Gibbs acted as District Telegraph Engineer in Otago and Auckland, and in 1918 he returned to Wellington as Deputy-Chief Telegraph Engineer. In 1920 he acted as Chief Telegraph En-

gineer in the absence of Mr. Shimpton, and the latter’s retirement. now leaves him in permanent occupation of that position. From 1911 onwards Mr. Gibbs was actively connected with most of the modern developments of New Zealand’s telegraphy and telephony, both the wire and the w'irelss systems. These developments are of particular importance, including the building up of the automatic telephone system (of which he was principal executive officer for some years), and the installation of wireless —both coastal stations and ship' stations. The last decade and a half, notwithstanding the interruption caused bv the war, has been a period of rapid progress in established telegraphic methods—multiplex telegraphy, for instance—as well as in the newer sciences j and it is likely that equal or greater advance will be made in the next decade with its new problems of the ether, including the much-discussed directional wireless. . That Mr. Gibbs has long maintained a broad outlook and has kept m step with the electrical world’s advance-on-manv-fronts is sufficiently indicated bv the fact that he was recently appointed hon. secretary and . treasurer for New Zealand of the British Institution of Electrical Engineers.