NEW RADIO DETECTIVE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17231, 10 April 1930, Page 12

NEW RADIO DETECTIVE

TELLS WHO MAKES STATIC

CAMERA PLATE ‘[FINGERPRINTS’

AM ITS, i LA.). March -1

A null'd detective which fingerprints forms of static, acquits the innocent and indicts the guilty, has been perfected by Mr. ,1. K. McXeely, electrical engineer, and .Mr. I’. .1. Konkle, railin’ engineer, laith of lowa S.late College. The apparatus, which already has demonstrated its effectiveness in several ti'sts, is called an oscillograph and is an electrical camera which records sounds of electrical disturbances as the identification ('Xpert’s camera records whorls and loops of fingerprints

Interference, to the ear. seems similar, whether caused by an ultra-violet ray machine oi a broken insulator on an electric power line pole, but oscillograph pictures of the sounds arc totally unlike, Mr McXeely explained. .lust as similar photographic reproductions of fingerprints must hme conic from the. same finger, he explained, so identical pictures of static must be caused by similar disturbances.

Tints, through photography, Messrs. McXeely and Konkle have been able to inform radio listeners whose entertainment was disrunted by static that an old-fashioned hand-manipulated telephone instead of a suspected vacuum cleaner was the offending instrument.

The machine includes a portable receiving sc and the photogranhie apparatus. These arc installed where trouble has been reported, a picture of the (listurhrneo :’s made and compared with prints of known noises ’I hen unless Iho slid ic is of atmospheric origin tin* scientists are able to point to the base of the trouble.

The inventors envisioned an oscillo graph in every municipality for general use of the public in locating radio inter lerefiee.