TRIALS OF TELEHONES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19405, 13 August 1926, Page 13

TRIALS OF TELEHONES.

A WAY TO " GET EVEN." SIR OLIVER LODGE'S PLAN. Many people will be surprised to hear that the telephone has only been with the British people for 50 years. "But there is no doubt about it," says the Daily Telegraph in a humorous article. "Sir. Oliver Lodge and the Postmaster-General and othei? eminent people have just been celebrating the telephone's jubilee. Before 1876 nobody ever rang anybody up—so near -are we to the dark ages. Those to whom telephone gossip has become a habit, a second nature—we will not say a vice—must tremble to think how narrowly they have escaped living in a state of barbarism. We cannot think that Sir Oliver Lodge treated the great theme of the difference between the telephoning and the pre-teiephoning world with the proper solemnity. "When we are toid, for example, that the inventor of the telephone, Graham Be!', married a deaf and dumb wife and devoted himself to the accurate production of human speech we feel that the thing might have been put differently, with less strain . upon our emotions. Sir Oliver's point is that the teiephone is really an instrument of absurd simplicity, and the man who invented it was interested mainiy in introducing precision into human speech. The irony of human fate has ordained that the inability of our fellow-creatures to speak plainly should be more obvious and irritating than ever since telephones came in. Sir Oliver seems to think that bad speaking is not merely more obvious but more common. The pulpit, he remarks coldly, never did speak well, but the stage, which used to, has grown worse, and now speaks in the way. that people talk in ordinary life —a way which is not really admirable. As dramatic criticism there is truth in thfs, but we are not persuaded that it is good criticism of the telephone " Our own difficulties are mainiy due to the refusal of people to talk as they do in ordinary life, and their preference for a most extraordinary manner of speech. But we do not claim an experience in suffering equal to Sir Oliver's. He has been in America. He found that at any time, day or night, he might be, and continually was, called up. Such are the penalties of greatness. Vainly he told the hotel clerk not to switch people on. It was beyond American understanding that a man should not want to hear his telephone ring. "The resources of science were, however, not quite exhausted. 'When too much bored,' said Sir Oliver, with modest pride, 'my plan was to turn the receiver on to the transmitter and let the communicator talk back to himself—a plan which was usually effective." Jt must at any rate have been a. relief. The impossibility of doing anything adequate and instant to the man at the other end has been one of the great defects of the telephone. Sir Oliver offers us a certain melancholy satisfaction which, to reflective minds, will have its charms."