BEDSIDE TOUR OF EUROPE

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 October 1928, Page 9

BEDSIDE TOUR OF EUROPE

EXTENSION OF TELEPHONES.

Merely sitting up in bed in London one may soon be able to take a trot round Europe. “All that is necessary is the telephone,” says a London paper. “Ask for ‘trunks,’ give in your numbers and you may speak to Paris or Oslo or Vienna or Berlin or Prague or Milan or Monte Carlo.

“You may transact more business than has been possible by weeks of correspondence and then turn over and go to sleep again. The bed may be in London or at the seaside, or in a shooting-box hi the North. So long as there is a telephone receiver alongside, Europe is at your ear.” London has been talking to Paris for 37 years. Two years ago came the first direct communication with Berlin and during the past IS months the system has extended to Northern Italy and Czecho-Slovakia. In Italy only Milan is.as yet within reach, but there is every prospect that the extension to Romo will not be . long delayed.

“There is no immediate prospect of telephones to Russia, or the Balkan States yet,” said a high authority, “but not many parts of Europe lie out in the cold. The extensions that have been made during the last eighteen months would have been possible long before but (or the need for standardising apparatus, materials and methods of operating. Com-

pared with the difficulties in these respects, frontier and language difficulties were trilling. “It was only last year that London began talking to Sweden and Norway, but in both countries there have been considerable extensions since. Czechoslovakia. came on to the telephone a few months ago; now we can reach two zones and speak to the whole of Bohemia and Moravia and Silesia. Save at the busiest parts of the day a London caller can get through to Czechoslovakia in about 20 minutes That is the rough average for these long-dis-tance European calls. Failures are few. Milan has been as easy to hear on the first day of working as Manchester.

“Telephone traffic to all parts of the Continent is increasing very rapidly. Travellers separated from their offices and families are using the lines to keep in touch and the public are showing a. keen appreciation of the cheaper rates that, are available at night. A call to Milan from London, for example, is only 5/9 for three minutes between 7.30 p.m. and 8.30 a.m.”