WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13666, 6 February 1908, Page 4

WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY.

the wireless connection established between New Zealand and Australia, during, the past week, is more valuable as showing the possibilities of the system than would have been direct communication between land installations. H.M.S. Pioneer, lying in Wellington Harbour, sends messages which are picked up by H.M.S. Powerful, then steaming across Tasman's Sea, and are forwarded on to H.M.S. Psyche, lying in Sydney Harbour. Thus, without any land-installation whatever, but simply by making use of the ordinary equipment of warships — an equipment which is being gradually installed in all great ocean-going vessels—we have been enabled for the first- time to communicate electrically with Australia without using the cable. . The experiment, obviously, does not make it any the less desirable that there should be wireless stations established on both sides.of Tasman's Sea, but it opens up a vista of what may be done as this wonderful system develops. Every equipped vessel in any port may be a temporary transmitting and receiving station, and every equipped vessel traversing the seas may be a repeating station, just as every ship, at need, is now a mailcarrier. The wireless system, though still far from perfect, has completely demonstrated its ability to modify distance and to enable communications to be carried on between otherwise unconnected points. The time is already approaching when we need no longer fear temporary isolation from the, rest of the world by the cutting of the cables and when no passenger-ships and few large cargo-vessels will ever get out of touch with the coasts. Whereby civilised peoples are Deing steadily brought into closer and more permanent relations with one another; and the most outlying countries, such as New Zealand, are being enabled to be as fully part of the great comity of nations as though separating seas did not exist.