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Otago Daily Times, Issue 20006, 25 January 1927, Page 8

Thu great cable companies, after having for so many years thrown a girdle of communication round the earth, are not prepared meekly to await the hour when wireless shall step in and usurp their prerogatives. They are bent on demonstrating that they can hold their own, and they are exhibiting a confidence that calls for admiration in the face of the rapid strides in the transmission of messages by wireless. All that has already been accomplished by the ethereal rival to the very material cable, and the much greater things that have been predicted in respect of long-dis-tance wireless communication, have stimulated the cable companies to show an enterprise that has already been

attended with gratifying results. The I Eastern Extension Company’s adoption j of a new regenerator sys?em is said to promise a very valuable speeding up of messages, and Lord Burnham’s reference to it as an enormous development in the facilities of cable communication will not have been made without adequate justification. It is reported, too, that the results obtained in the testing jof tho new Pacific cable have been beyond all expectations, a speed of 240 words a minute having been recorded with admirable distinctness. Mr J. C. LTmson-Pender, a representative of the Eastern and other companies, has boasted that transmission cannot be speedier or more accurate than that by cable, and that, therefore, the cable companies cannot yield a point in the argument to the wireless agencies. That claim cannot perhaps be challenged at present since there is a necessary factor common to both systems of transmission, and it is all in the public interest that wireless and the cable should be rivals for the provision of facilities for rapid communication. But wireless telephony has already been established on a commercial basis across the Atlantic. And when the time comes—though it may yet be somewhat distant—when the human voice can reach from England to the Antipodes, from China to Peru, it is difficult to see what effective reply the cable companies will then be able to make. They must, it would seem, be prepared in that day to yield a point in the argument.

It is probable that, second only to electricity', petroleum bolds the most important place in the world to-day as a producer of energy For purposes of transport both by sea and by land, oil has become essential, and the demand is increasing out of proportion to the supply. Consequently a continual search, in which scientists with new methods of oil-finding are taking a prominent part, is being made for fresh oil fields. In these circumstances the rather doleful tone of a speech by Sir John Cadman at the Royal Colonial Institute last week is perfectly intelligible. The position which he indicated is far from a satisfactory one. At the present time only 2 per cent, of the world’s supplies of petroleum and its products has its source within the Empire, and the imports of oil cost the British Empire something like forty million sterling annually. Of the 2 per cent, the greater proportion comes from British India, including Burmah, and the balance is produced in Trinidad, Canada, and Papua, but in diminishing or non-commercial quantities. Trinidad and Burmah may be reckoned the most important of the Empire’s oil-producing countries, but the total annual output from both these sources, taken together, hardly equals a week’s supply from the United States. It is only barely possible that within the confines of the Empire an oil field of first-class importance exists undiscovered. This being so, the view expressed by Sir John Cadmau appears well founded. This is to the effect that public opinion in the future will applaud the foresight of British statesmanship which did not hesitate to secure control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—purely as a commercial undertaking, and with no political or diplomatic end in view.

“Man has passed through the stone age, the bronze age, and the iron age.” This statement by Professor Shimer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has special reference to the steps that have been taken, and are being taken, 7 . ° 7 in different countries to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere. The importance of nitrogen consists in the fact that a deficiency of this element in the soil brings about low yields of crops. But the world has been warned by scientific authorities that an actual scarcity of foodstuffs is not very far distant unless research shows the way to an intensification of production. In order that there may be increasing yields of food crops it is necessary that plant constituents which are removed from the soil by cropping should be restored to it. As the most important of these is nitrogen, and as it is supposed that tho nitrate deposits of Chile, which have been the principal source of nitrogen for fertiliser, will be exhausted in a comparatively short time, schemes for the extraction of nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is the great ultimate source of it and which holds a limitless supply of it have assumed a high degree of importance. One such scheme, it need hardly be said, is being directed to the utilisation of water power on tho West Coast of this island for tho extraction of nitrogen from the air. The value of industries of this description consists in the contribution that is made by them to human welfare by admitting of the replenishment of the soil and, thus, of the augmentation of the food supplies of the world.