25 YEARS AGO

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 133, 29 February 1936, Page 8

25 YEARS AGO

Wireless Telephony (From “The Dominion,” March 3, 1911,) Mr. A. D. Gabriel, wireless operator on the. Mai tai, tells of the successful experiments that are being made in wireless telephony in America. Instead of the “dot and dash” language of the morse instrument, the human voice or any other noise can be projected by power into the ether and carried along in the isame. manner as the morse code signals. While lying at anchor in San Francisco harbour with the receiver to his ears, he intercepted spoken messages repeatedly, and on another occasion listened to,a gramophone selection that was being played six or seven miles away. The chief officer of the Maitai, Mr. Ferguson, states that he had the receiver on one night in San Francisco, and heard a voice out of the air saying, “Hello, hello 1” quite distinctly. Mr. Ferguson could not say exactly oyer what distance the wireless telephone is operative, but had been given to understand that the human voice had been heard by wireless up to a hundred miles. [lt is unlikely that the transmitters or receivers in this instance included valves, and “reaction” had not been invented. Probably the transmitter used an arc, and the Maitai’s receiver was a crystal set. Die Maitai had arrived at Wellington that day from San Francisco.] ♦ « *

It is one of the most interesting sights in the Hutt Valley. In appearance it is a bridge, and quite a handsome bridge at that, but anyone who cared to be quarrelsome about words might say that if a bridge is a structure that carries traffic this erection does not deserve the name. Whatever it ought to be named, it is usually described as the new Hutt Pipe Bridge, and it spans the Hutt River close to the old racecourse at Hutt Park. It is complete and apparently .satisfactory in every respect, except that it has no approaches. Neither man nor beast can get upon it to use it. From Petone railway station, Jackson Street, the main business thoroughfare of the borough, runs in a straight line eastward toward the river. But it does not get there. At about a mile and a half from the station it degenerates into a narrow cart track metalled with cinders. Yet a little, further it is barricaded with a gate, which consists largely of barbed wire. After that it is a striped arrangement of turf and ruts, and then it gets mixed up with a mass of wooden buildings, after which there are the level paddocks intersected by the weedy lagoon which is called the western branch of the Hutt River, and then the bridge.