QUICK TELEGRAPHING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 5997, 5 February 1881, Page 7

QUICK TELEGRAPHING.

Av ordinary telegraph clerk can send a message of twenty words, including; the iddress, in a minute. This does not seem a

very rapid rate of telegraphing, yet if we consider that every average Ktiglish word contains five letters, and that three separate signals are required by thu Morse telegraphie code to indicate a letter, we shall see that; twenty, or say twenty-five words, amounting to 37i) separate signals, necessitating on the part of the clerk as many distinct movements of the hand per minute. Knowing this, we are better able to appieeiate the rapidity of the operator's manipulation ; still the result is disappoint-

ing when we take into account the iucouceivable spued at which the electric currents travel along a wire—say 200,000 miles a second. It is clear that a. line is capable of transmitting an enormous number of separate curents in a minute, if sent into it by some

rapid mechanical means ; and hence -we have the automatic sender of the late Professor Wheatstone, now employed in the postal telegraphs. Whcatstone's apparatus transmits - 200 words a minute over some of our long inland circuits, say from Leeds to Kdiubttrgh. A still more rapid telegraph was, however, brought quite recently from America, and is now being tried on the Submarine Company's line from I'aris to London for the transmission of Continental messages and press intelligence. It is really a resuscitation of the chemical telegraph of Alexander Bain the ingenious Caithness elockmaker, and the message is recorded on a travelling tape of chemically-prepared paper by a pair of steel pens or styluses, from which the electric currents flow and mark the signals of each letter by a double line of blue strokes in the tracks of the pens. This apparatus, which is the production of several united inventors, is now in daily operation in America, on a new line from Boston to Sew York, transmitting all kiuds of messages at the rate of a thousand words a minute. This telegraphic feat will be better appreciated when it is understood that in order to do this some five hundred separate signal currents are sent into the line every second. Moreover, the instrument can work up to eighteen hundred words a minute ou occasion, and under special circumstances. The sending is of course done automatically, the message! being first perforated ou a strip of paper, which is afterwards pulled through an automatic "key" transmitting currents into the line.—Globe.