VOICE ROUND WORLD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18020, 20 February 1922, Page 8

VOICE ROUND WORLD.

LATEST WIRELESS WONDER.

NEW WELSH STATION.

MESSAGES TO AUSTRALIA^

High up among tho bare, wind-swept Welsh hills is a voice which can speak to the whole world at once. It is the great Trans-atlantic wireless station at Cefn Du, a few miles from Carnarvon, in North Wales, and on the foothills of Snowdon. A few weeks ago it sent for the Daily Mail a direct wireless message half roand the world to Australia. This was the first direct wireless message sent from Great Britain to a private person in Australia. Inside a. brick building at the foot of several great steel aerial masts 400 ft. high is the strangely fascinating device which can send wireless signals to the other side of the world in one-sixteenth of a second, and in tho time taken to strike a match can completely surround the earth with an envelope of electric waves

Picture a luminous wall of large bottles of thin glass glowing with a subdued light—a curiously ghostly radiance, steady and unwinking! Such is the wondervoice of Carnarvon. There are 56 of these bottles, each nearly the size and shape of a Rugby football with a slight bulb aft each end, and they are fixed in four long rows in a large steel frame some 15ft. long and 10ft. high In a complicated tangle of glass tubes and white porcelain insulators and'wire covered with emerald green and orange non-conductive fabric, and of pink indiarubber air tubes, these magic phials glow, and so, quietly glowing, can whisper at the same moment to Persia and Tasmania, to Alaska and Peking. These 56 glass bottles of light are the thermionic valves which cause the electric oscillation necessary to radiate a wireless wave across the earth. They take the pjace of the roaring blue spark of the older day, and when they speak across the world show no signs of their colossal power but glow as gently and as evenly as ever.

One Man Take's Charge. Behind these rows of fat glass bottles, which seem like the glowing retorts of some istrange .chemical experiments, a coil of thick insulated wire waves round about a circular wooden frame which stands on porcelain pillars. This is the " aerial inductance,' and on another frame, which completely surrounds the first but is entirely separated from it, is a coil of similar wire in red insulation. This is connected to the valve, and the impulse which sends a film of energy about the whole earth in a moment of time travels from the radiant bottles to the aerial across a. bridge of air. The room is luminous with the soft light of the valve, and there is .scarcely a sound wive for the even drone of the dynamos operating the set. This is a magician's chamber of 1921, where, by pressing a tiny key, one might circle the globe in a moment and send commands to all the four corners of the earth at once. " This valve transmitter is the largest in the world, and has only been completed in the last few months,' said an official of the Marconi Company to a press representative. " The great value of this transmitter is that it is capable of girdling the earth with the same power which hithertp has been necessary to send messages to the United States. The new apparatus is not yet finally installed, but will be ready for the commercial service in a few weeks."

" How many men are required to take charge of this apparatus for sending a message round the world?" he was asked. " One," he replied. " And he would have comparatively little to do. He would merely have to keep an eye on the working of the set, which would be operated by automatic transmission from our Transatlantic receiving station at Towyn, some 45 miles away.' Long Wireless Talk. A further recent development in radio communication was. demonstrated a vtew weeks ago. By means of the wiroless link, Amsterdam was brought into direct telephonic communication with London for the first time; and one of the first messages to be sent by it was a message of Christmas greetings to the Daily Mail correspondent at The Hague At three o'clock in the afternoon a Daily Mail reporter, sitting at an ordinary telephone in Marconi House, Strand, heard a voice say,.'' Amsterdam on the line; the Daily Mail correspondent is going to speak to you." Then a voice, small, but perfectly distinct, came across the wireless link over the North Sea. The reporter gave a message of Christmas greetings, and afterwards a telephone chat took place with as much ease as if the "speakers were at Hampstead and Richmond respectively. By means of a special installation of the Marconi Company, who arranged the test, it was possible for the speakers to talk and listen without the necessity of changing over, one speaker being able to break in and interrupt the other if neces-

sary. The message went first from London over a metallic circuit, partly underground, to Southwold (Suffolk). There the voice was transmitted by wireless to Zandvoort, 115 miles away, where it was connected to aj trunk line to Amsterdam. " When I spoke by wireless telephone to tho Daily Mail reporter in London, his voice was as audible as if we had been speaking on a local telephone," said The Hague correspondent later. " The British ( Consul, Mr. H. Tom, has sent a message of heartiest congratulations on this successful development, which he considers must in time have an enormous influence on the trade relations of the two countries."